Fans already knew the television reboot of "A League of Their Own" was going
to be a woke nightmare; the creator bragged about it during interviews after
the project was announced. But it turns out the finished product is even too
cringe for one reviewer who called the show a "noble effort."

Early reviews are in for the Amazon series, which becomes available for
streaming August 12. While some critics are heaping praise on the historical
drama for delving deeper in "queer culture" and gender topics, at least one
reviewer dubbed the remake "preachy not peachy" despite agreeing with the
overall aim.

Dave Nemetz from TV Line said the new "A League of Their Own" made a "noble
effort" but that the series so far is "a little too eager to make its point,
sidelining the baseball elements and getting bogged down in heavy-handed
subplots." He mentions that there's a lot of narrative, but not a lot of
actual baseball.

https://youtu.be/H8qMhtkB18k

The original "A League of Their Own" starring Geena Davis and Tom Hanks told
the story of how women played professional baseball during World War II while
the men were off at battle. This expanded TV version focuses on the same
team, the Rockford Peaches, which were a part of the All-American Girls
Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Only the Amazon version delves deep
into modern social issues that the movie only touched on.

"There was a much bigger story there that wasn't just about a team, but that
was really about a whole generation," series co-creator Will Graham said
earlier this year. "That's a big part of why we wanted to make it. It was
just this feeling of--especially with queer stories, women of color--having a
story that's really centered on joy."

The TV Line review notes how the relationship between Dottie (Davis) and her
younger sister Kit (Lori Petty) in the original movie is touching and
memorable, but that same chemistry is absent in the relationship between the
main characters in the reboot. For the new version, Abbi Jacobson plays
Carson Shaw, a married woman who leaves to join the league while her husband
is away fighting in the war. She begins having feelings for another woman on
the team after joining.

"We're not trying to retell the stories that are told in the film," Jacobson
told ET during a recent interview. "We are really attempting to tell the
stories that were missing from the film, and about this league in particular.
The more we researched the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League,
the more we researched queer culture at the time, the more it just felt
really important to show those stories."

Nemetz says the women's romance is "soppy and predictable."

"We may not have seen anything this explicitly gay in the original movie, but
we've definitely seen LGBTQ storylines like this many times before," he
writes.

Some other reviewers had the opposite reaction, however. The Collider
reviewer said "A League of Their Own" is "full of profound stories of
sisterhood, identity, race relations, and queerness." Screen Rant called it a
"near-perfect update" to the original. Two days before the show's release it
had an 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 18 critic reviews.

Audience scores won't be available until the show is officially released
Friday on Amazon.

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Let's go Brandon!