Abbi Jacobson got Penny Marshall's blessing for 'A League of Their Own' series remake

Penny Marshall died at 75 years from diabetic complications in December 2018, but Abbi Jacobson got to speak with her before she passed about the forthcoming series remake of A League of Their Own. 

"It was pretty incredible," Jacobson said on The Drew Barrymore Show. "Will Graham asked me to do this project with him, and we got the opportunity to jump on the phone with (Marshall)—really to get her blessing and to just ask her about the experience."

The Broad City star continued: 

"She goes, 'Well, um, go and do it already. I mean, go and do it.' I was like, 'OK!' And that was it. Yeah, she was so sweet and supportive. It's very much a reimagining of the film. We are doing sort of a reexamining of what it was like. We're telling a lot of stories of what it was like for women who had the dream to play baseball. "So, yes, a door opens for a lot of white women and white-passing women that get in the league that we all know from the film, but what about the Black women who were not allowed to try out and had to sort of carve their own path to play baseball? It's also a really queer story, which I know it's wild to imagine that women playing professional baseball might have been queer, but they were! And that sort of wasn't part of the film. So, we're really trying to keep the spirit and the joy that the film has and just open up the lens to tell a lot more stories and a lot more of the realities of what was going on in 1943."