Prime Video had been eying a series adaptation of the feminist baseball classic A League of Their Own since Spring 2018. Veteran Prime writer Will Graham partnered with Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson to pen a pilot, which was filmed in February 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed development of the project but it eventually received a series order from the platform in August of that year. Upon its release on Prime on August 12, 2022, the series was a homerun for both audiences and critics. A League of Their Own netted an impressive 500 million minutes watched in its first week and ranked No. 6 in Luminate’s Top 50 Streaming TV Shows Chart. Many lauded the series’ bold expansion of queer and racial commentary, and a renewal seemed imminent.
The renewal finally arrived in March 2023 only for the WGA Strike to commence in May. The strike had a swift, devastating impact on the entertainment industry, especially once SAG followed suit in July. A League of Their Own was effectively called out on strikes in August 2023 when Prime Video canceled its Season 2 renewal. This pullback came as a shock for the series’ dedicated fans, and many people (including the cast) were skeptical of the platform’s claim that the strikes had contributed to its cancellation.
One factor that Prime used to justify this decision was the series’ performance following its premiere compared to the platform’s headlining titles like Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power and Citadel. In the weeks leading up to its cancellation, A League of Their Own struggled to net over 500,000 daily minutes watched, a far cry from its first 12 weeks on the platform.
There is more nuance beyond these metrics. Take for example the Amazon/BBC co-production The Outlaws. That series’ second season premiered around the same time as A League of Their Own. Both titles had a very similar viewership performance out of the gate and received renewals around the same time. When League was canceled in August 2023, The Outlaws had significantly less viewership, but it did not meet the same fate.
This data indicates that a series’ performance does not always correlate to a renewal. A League Of Their Own had a higher production budget than The Outlaws, which was filmed in the UK. Prime Video likely felt that a shift to off-shore production could help them weather through the strikes. But this leaves the question of why the platform opted to terminate the series’ second season, rather than putting production on hold until after the strikes (as was done with the third season of The Wheel Of Time). Not difficult to argue that A League of Their Own fills a larger network need for Prime when compared to The Outlaws. There are countless international espionage dramas on the platform, from Citadel to Jack Ryan. A League of Their Own was unique: based on a beloved IP, it featured queer creators (nonbinary and female) and was extremely diverse both in front of and behind the camera. Through the lens of a period piece, it told sapphic, Black and Latin/Hispanic stories. Its cancellation has a wider impact in DEI representation and the series was a casualty of bad timing and bad luck. It’s unfortunate that this promising series wasn’t given the time and resources to reach its full potential.
