Abbi Jacobson — the star and showrunner of A League of Their Own, a woke Amazon series based on the 1992 baseball movie — is calling the company “cowardly” for canceling the show’s abbreviated second season and blaming the Hollywood writer’s strike for the decision.
The little-watched series had been given the greenlight for a shorter season two, which would give it a proper finale.
Amazon explained that the strike would have pushed the second season — which has already been filmed — to 2025, but the streamer already has a full list of new content scheduled and has no room for the show, according to the Hollywood Reporter. So, the cancellation of the queer-themed, four-episode second season was announced on August 18.
However, series creator Abbi Jacobson was not satisfied with the stated reason for the cancellation, Yahoo News reported.
Jacobson — who stars as Carson Shaw, a married woman who realizes she is a lesbian after joining the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team — called foul ball at Amazon.
“I am sad today,” Jacobson wrote in an Instagram post. “To blame this cancellation on the strike… is bullshit and cowardly.”
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From the start, the Amazon series dove headlong into woke politics by focusing heavily on the racism of 1940s America and, unlike the movie, made many of the female ball players lesbians. The first season’s final episode, for instance, showed Jacobson’s character engaged in a passionate kiss with another woman as her shocked husband watches nearby.
Rosie O’Donnell, a star of the classic 1992 film, appears in the new series as a new character — the owner of a gay bar.
The series won a number of awards from radical, left-wing groups. It won the outstanding new TV series from gay advocacy group GLAAD, won an NAACP Image Award, won the Critics Choice Association’s “female empowerment in entertainment” recognition, earned the National Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign, and the Voice and Visibility Award from the racist Hispanic group the National Council of La Raza.
Despite the long list of alphabet recognition, audiences reportedly found the overt woke themes “off-putting.”
As the Reporter noted back in April, the series was a “disappointment” in ratings and didn’t justify its high production price tag.
The paper added that during a marketing meeting for the series, officials said that “data showed audiences found queer stories off-putting and suggested downplaying those themes in materials promoting the show.” But since race and queer sex were the whole point of the series, Jacobson and her team were incensed by Amazon’s position on the show.
The clash between Jacobson, her producing partner Will Graham, and Amazon’s executives led to Amazon dumping its evaluation system which downplayed queer themes. And while the short final season was given the greenlight, it has now ultimately been canceled by the streamer.
Sony, which holds the rights to the original movie and the characters, said it is now shopping the final four episodes around to see if another streamer will air them.
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