S01.E01: Batter Up

[OtterMommy]

Quote

Due to the war-time shortage of men to play baseball, team owners test the idea of a women's baseball league. Through all the hard work, hard times, and hard balls, these ladies are NOT playing around. Spoiler. There IS crying in baseball.

Streaming Date: August 12, 2022

[CrowTRobot]

I really wanted to love this show and I do think it looks beautiful.  The sets, costumes and cinematography are great.  But the anachronistic dialogue takes me right out of any period they are trying to create.  Abbi's dialogue sounds just like Bean's dialogue from Disenchantment and in a cartoon the anachronistic tendencies are fine.  But in what's supposed to be a period piece, it is too jarring and just does not work.  It looks like 1943 but sounds like 2022 and that's really disappointing.  I'll continue watching but am so bummed they wrote the dialogue with modern tendencies and idioms.

[meep.meep]

I liked it.  Some of the old ladies in the stands were the older players from the end of the movie, right?

[Mabinogia]

41 minutes ago, meep.meep said:

Some of the old ladies in the stands were the older players from the end of the movie, right?

The fact the camera focused on them for a moment makes me think they must be, which makes me happy. Just like with the movie, I am glad some of those involved in the actual women's league are around to see that people are still interested. 

The dialog hasn't bothered me in the slightest. It's far less annoying than all the other historically inaccurate shows out there that get away with it because they're being all "feminist". (I put it in quotes because I don't think it is particularly feminist to rewrite history to make every woman a badass modern woman who happens to live in the past. It's just lazy and pandering.) 

The only part, so far, that I was side eying was the whole intro sequence with the train. After that, with the stopping to chat when she's been running to catch a train just so we get to see her plucky determination to get onto the moving train (they should just have had her running late and skipped the stopping to talk to that couple bit which served no purpose), I fell in love with the show. I pretty much adore all the characters, which is the biggest draw to me of any show, and the fashion and the cars and all of it. 

[gesundheit]

The 2022 dialogue took me out of it for the first episode, I'll admit, but once I was locked in, it was actually really effective for me as the series went on.

[possibilities]

I saw Abbi Jacobson being interviewed on The Daily Show and she says they interviewed the women they could find who are still alive and were in the real league. She said they specifically wanted to showcase situations and issues that were not able to be shown in earlier treatments of the story, and that they consulted with the actual league members to make it accurate. I don't mean they didn't take any tv-liberties. It's not a pure documentary. But they did make an effort to talk to the actual league members so that they could portray situations that were related to reality. There was one 96 year old in particular who she talked about her conversation with. 

I binged the entire season yesterday, and I loved it. It's of course not perfect, but what is?

[Megan]

I'm on episode 4 and I keep thinking I should just go watch the movie instead. I really wanted to like this.

I think my main issue is that the two main characters, Carson and Max, are both really unlikable.  I really like Clance. Greta seems like she's up to no good and is untrustworthy. I also like Dale Dickey as the house mother.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Megan

[Daff]

I like the casting. The dialogue isn’t too awfully anachronistic. I did understand why the first character, running for the train stopped to respond to her family members, and I thought it was very telling about her personality as well as the family dynamic. I found it hilarious in the vein of “just keep nodding your head”, smiling, agreeing,… proceed, and they’ll catch on somewhere down the road (when you’re out of both sight and reach). Very annoying that they would discuss, play, and dance to popular music of the time, then assault our sensibilities with “Take Another Piece of My Heart” ( no disrespect to Janis). That totally soured the episode I had just watched! Those soldiers weren’t going off to Vietnam! They were too lazy to research a contemporaneous tune with a similar sentiment?

[Cloud9Shopper]

I’m a big fan of the movie, so I was excited for this and wanted to see it, and it just fell flat to me like so many streaming originals seem to. (I also haven’t liked most Netflix or Hulu originals; maybe it’s just a matter of preference.) The running for the train scene was a ripoff of the movie. Maybe if they had done their own opening and not pretty much copied something it would have worked better. 

I’ll give it a couple more episodes before writing it off, though. 

[lucindabelle]

I was struck by how the actresses and the world in general didn’t have theHollywood Glamor”- no Madonna here. I’m not sure that’s an improvement. For example when they are dancing it looks realistic/ but I LOVED the choreographed roadhouse in the movie. The running for the train and the engineer saying “come on” is something I loved, in the movie… because it showed me how times have changed. Running for a train HAPPENED then, and doesn’t now.

thag said the characters do have different names- it’s not Dottie the Queen of hearts/m- so I’m intrigued. I just see it as different from the film, so far.

i did love the sister dynamic between Dottie and kit though.  And I missed the illiterate girl when the team lists went up. That was a lovely moment in the film that said s lot about period.

i LIKED seeing some of the scouting in the film/ we had a sense of the vastness of the country. And seeing the girls play baseball at home first. Oh well. 

[Corgi-ears]

A play in three acts, involving me:

Me, about 20 mins into the episode: Oh, I guess Carson and Greta are the show's version of Kit and Dottie? That's cool. Abbi and Darcy kind of look like they could be sisters...

Me, one haircutting scene later: Um, wait.

Me, another 10 mins later: ...sisters WHO ARE GONNA FUCK! Hey yo.

[gesundheit]

I think in this one the Dottie/Kit sisterly relationship is mirrored by Greta/Jo, which I love.

[Bastet]

As someone who utterly adores the film and remembers the dreadful series that tried to capitalize on its success by putting the same characters in a sitcom, I was quite relieved when the trailer for this revealed the series would be about different characters. 

I binged the whole thing with a sleep break about halfway through, so now I'm going back and properly digesting each episode.

Right off the bat (no pun intended), I'm into this.  I like the homages to the film they're sprinkling in, and, while most of the cast is unknown to me, everyone feels natural.  I already like the dynamic between Jo, Greta, and Carson (I love that, by the time they get to the tryouts, they're a trio), and love that between Max and Clance.  They clearly support each other despite their differences, and Max still trippin' on Clance being a wife amuses me.  I also love how Guy fits into their friendship, like when Clance tells Max she loves her more than anyone and he says, "I'm right here."

We haven't yet learned much about the others, but I like the glimpses we've seen -- Lupe and Jess talking about screw it, we'll have money to pay the fines, so we are not wearing dresses, Esti's pure joy at finding someone else who speaks Spanish, Maybelle having dumped yet another guy because they see her and think they know what they're getting, but she's going to talk their ear off and she's going to outrun them. 

And I like Sarge, their chaperone (I like Dale Dickey - one of the few cast members I'm familiar with - in just about everything I see her in).

I love the palpable excitement and camaraderie in the closing scene, and how that's juxtaposed with Max back at the shop, sweeping up and throwing pitches at a wall instead of being in that locker room with them where she deserves to be.

While I greatly appreciate the deep dive the film took into period details, as the little things do add up, I'm fine with a production taking a looser approach like this one -- but everyone's vernacular being littered with likes, yeahs, okays, and I means is distracting.  In fact, Carson's entire speech pattern and mannerisms are incredibly 21st century.  But that's my only quibble, so I'm more than interested enough to roll with it.

Edited August 25, 2022 by Bastet

[Raja]

Seeing the billboards I wondered how they would handle American segregation of the period. I sort of lost interest about halfway through but did come back to finish off the pilot/origin story episode. I have never seen the movie or I am reading there was a network TV attempt so nothing to compare to there. It is one of those shows that if I have a spare hour and nothing on YouTube catches my eye I will be back to finish.

A 60s song in the closing credits? I guess we were spared an up coming hip hop artist rapping over a Duke or Glen Miller sample. But it still came off like a DJ making one long scratch of a needle across an album.

[Bastet]

6 hours ago, Raja said:

A 60s song in the closing credits?

I didn't mind that at all.  The right music is one that sets the tone for a scene it's playing under, so it doesn't matter to me if it existed at the time the scene takes place.  The only time I care about anachronistic use of music is if the music is supposed to actually exist in the scene -- if characters in the '40s are dancing to a song that didn't come out until the '50s, then I object.

[Scarlett45]

I didn’t know this series was coming until a few weeks ago, but I am finally sitting down to watch. Looking forward to reading all of your comments here. 
 

[Scarlett45]

On 8/15/2022 at 10:21 AM, gesundheit said:

I think in this one the Dottie/Kit sisterly relationship is mirrored by Greta/Jo, which I love.

I do like Greta & Jo as “sisters”. I thought Greta’s kissing Carson was a bit cruel, or at least insensitive. Carson is probably going through a lot emotionally if the notion of her husband coming home sends her to try outs, but the idea of being a “married woman” made her not consider it. 

On 8/25/2022 at 1:02 PM, Bastet said:

I already like the dynamic between Jo, Greta, and Carson (I love that, by the time they get to the tryouts, they're a trio), and love that between Max and Clance.  They clearly support each other despite their differences, and Max still trippin' on Clance being a wife amuses me.  I also love how Guy fits into their friendship, like when Clance tells Max she loves her more than anyone and he says, "I'm right here."

Me too!