Adam Lenhardt
Senior HTF Member
I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. I don't give two craps about baseball, but I do invest in people, and the things that drive them individually and inspire them collectively. This was a show that acutely aware of the ramifications of the hypothetical moment in history it was building its narrative around.
I grew up in the era of female empowerment. Slogans like "girls rule, boys drool" were common. I understood the good intentions behind them, but they always seemed self-defeating to me. In attempting to build confidence, they were selling girls a false bill of goods: You're better than the boys, and you succeed tremendously at things that will make them struggle. And so many heroines of fiction reflect this narrative: they're always a step ahead of everybody else, smarter and funnier and more morally attuned. As phenomenal as Hayley Atwell is as Peggy Carter, "Marvel's Agent Carter" could often be guilty of this.
From what I've seen, the reality of breaking barriers is a slog: You not only need to be able to keep up with the competition, you need to work harder, fight through headwinds that the competition doesn't, and most of all you've got to endure when you can barely keep your head above water. This is a show that seems to get that.
Ginny Baker is not the greatest player to ever grace the Major Leagues. Her ball speed, while very impressive for a woman, isn't competitive with the top major league pitchers. Instead, she has a screwball that negates that shortcoming -- at least enough to generate a respectable number of outs. If she had stepped up the mound and pitched a no hitter, I would have been done with the show. It wouldn't have been a drama, it would have been a wish fufillment fantasy.
Instead, her first appearance on a major league mound was a complete disaster. Her second game got off to a rough start, and then became a good but fairly unexceptional performance. And in between was a lot of psychological perseverance and diligent sharpening of fundamental skills. That's a journey that feels more meaningful and earns my emotional investment. It's like the first Rocky; if Rocky had gotten in the ring and knocked Apollo Creed out early in the fight, it would have just been another quickly forgotten sports movies. It's an Oscar-winning classic because this nobody with no business fighting the heavyweight champion of the world gets into that ring and manages to hold on longer than anybody thought possible. Those are the kind of stories people can relate to, and the kind of stories people care about and remember.
The show is keenly aware of the business dynamics at play, the historical dynamics at play, and the gender dynamics at play. She is a spectacle that puts asses in seats, and that provides her with opportunities she wouldn't have if she was a male pitcher. But the public's interest in novelties can quickly fade. It's up to her to be a ball player that outlasts the novelty.
I'd only previously seen Kylie Bunbury on ABC Family's terrible primetime soap "Twisted", and her performance in that was one of the many weak points of an awful show. So I was blown away by her performance here. More than just about any show since "The Good Wife", the protagonist here spends a lot of time inside her own head without bouncing off other characters. And Bunbury conveys that internal journey clearly without overacting. I never detected a false note.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar has brought back the Zack Morris swagger, and I'm loving it. While Bunbury unquestionably carries the entirety of the show on her shoulders, Gosselaar is the counterweight on which the show is balanced. A perfect piece of casting.
Does the show play like an MLB advertisement? Yes, it does. But the verisimilitude it gets from being able to use real teams and real stadiums is worth enduring the branded product placement built into the show's DNA. If it were a fictional team in a fictional league, it just wouldn't have the same gravitas.
I only had a couple criticisms. Ali Larter was one of the drags on "Heroes" during its original run, and her publicity guru here feels like she'll quickly wear out her welcome. She probably should have just been a recurring character. I have absolutely no interest in her romantic subplot. And this is screenwriter Dan Fogelman's second pilot this week, and the second one to end on a major twist. I thought the twist worked beautifully on "This is Us"; I thought the twist here felt a little too gimmicky and tired. The show would have had a lot more colors to play with Michael Beach's character without that reveal.
I grew up in the era of female empowerment. Slogans like "girls rule, boys drool" were common. I understood the good intentions behind them, but they always seemed self-defeating to me. In attempting to build confidence, they were selling girls a false bill of goods: You're better than the boys, and you succeed tremendously at things that will make them struggle. And so many heroines of fiction reflect this narrative: they're always a step ahead of everybody else, smarter and funnier and more morally attuned. As phenomenal as Hayley Atwell is as Peggy Carter, "Marvel's Agent Carter" could often be guilty of this.
From what I've seen, the reality of breaking barriers is a slog: You not only need to be able to keep up with the competition, you need to work harder, fight through headwinds that the competition doesn't, and most of all you've got to endure when you can barely keep your head above water. This is a show that seems to get that.
Ginny Baker is not the greatest player to ever grace the Major Leagues. Her ball speed, while very impressive for a woman, isn't competitive with the top major league pitchers. Instead, she has a screwball that negates that shortcoming -- at least enough to generate a respectable number of outs. If she had stepped up the mound and pitched a no hitter, I would have been done with the show. It wouldn't have been a drama, it would have been a wish fufillment fantasy.
Instead, her first appearance on a major league mound was a complete disaster. Her second game got off to a rough start, and then became a good but fairly unexceptional performance. And in between was a lot of psychological perseverance and diligent sharpening of fundamental skills. That's a journey that feels more meaningful and earns my emotional investment. It's like the first Rocky; if Rocky had gotten in the ring and knocked Apollo Creed out early in the fight, it would have just been another quickly forgotten sports movies. It's an Oscar-winning classic because this nobody with no business fighting the heavyweight champion of the world gets into that ring and manages to hold on longer than anybody thought possible. Those are the kind of stories people can relate to, and the kind of stories people care about and remember.
The show is keenly aware of the business dynamics at play, the historical dynamics at play, and the gender dynamics at play. She is a spectacle that puts asses in seats, and that provides her with opportunities she wouldn't have if she was a male pitcher. But the public's interest in novelties can quickly fade. It's up to her to be a ball player that outlasts the novelty.
I'd only previously seen Kylie Bunbury on ABC Family's terrible primetime soap "Twisted", and her performance in that was one of the many weak points of an awful show. So I was blown away by her performance here. More than just about any show since "The Good Wife", the protagonist here spends a lot of time inside her own head without bouncing off other characters. And Bunbury conveys that internal journey clearly without overacting. I never detected a false note.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar has brought back the Zack Morris swagger, and I'm loving it. While Bunbury unquestionably carries the entirety of the show on her shoulders, Gosselaar is the counterweight on which the show is balanced. A perfect piece of casting.
Does the show play like an MLB advertisement? Yes, it does. But the verisimilitude it gets from being able to use real teams and real stadiums is worth enduring the branded product placement built into the show's DNA. If it were a fictional team in a fictional league, it just wouldn't have the same gravitas.
I only had a couple criticisms. Ali Larter was one of the drags on "Heroes" during its original run, and her publicity guru here feels like she'll quickly wear out her welcome. She probably should have just been a recurring character. I have absolutely no interest in her romantic subplot. And this is screenwriter Dan Fogelman's second pilot this week, and the second one to end on a major twist. I thought the twist worked beautifully on "This is Us"; I thought the twist here felt a little too gimmicky and tired. The show would have had a lot more colors to play with Michael Beach's character without that reveal.
