"Slo Pitch" is the goofy queer softball series we need during this bummer of a summer

If you took a shot of The Office, a splash of The Bad News Bears, and mixed them with some queer Gatorade, you'd have Slo Pitch, the new series from Shaftesbury and Boss + Co. Created by the Barbelle dream team of Gwenlyn Cumyn and K. Knox, plus J Stevens, the webseries follows a terrible LGBTQ+ Torontonian softball team, led by the mono-focused coach Joanne (Kirsten Rasmussen) and her team of apathetic misfits.

Joanne coaches The Brovaries, players with a mixed bag of talent like former professional player Mel (Amanda Cordner) who can't talk about her dismissal from the league, to the delightfully absurd Boris (Knox) who dabbles in corporate espionage and loves her beer with a side of pickles eggs, to Zari (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah) the team's brainy self-labeled token straight member. Joanne has her work cut out for her and tries all kinds of methods to get her team to take the team as seriously as she does.

There's a lot to love about Slo Pitch: queer romance, secrets, turf wars, polyamory, sworn enemies, and of course, softball. What makes it even better is the series commitment to diversity and inclusion. According to the creative team, "Slo Pitch features a fully female and/or non-binary led creative team, a key cast that is 50% BIPOC, 70% of the cast and crew identifying as female or non-binary, and 80% of key cast identifying as LGBT+."

With sports pretty much canceled for summer, Slo Pitch might just scratch that itch. Plus you'll be living for the wacky, endearing, and sometimes cringe-worthy escapades of The Brovaries team. The cast is a real treat, with lots of familiar faces from the Toronto acting scene plus some newbies who you'll want to follow. I'm on board with anything that Cumyn and Knox are behind, and while not as glossy as Barbelle, I'm down to play left-field for The Brovaries anytime. As long as there's lots of beer.

Slo Pitch is available through OutTVGo, Apple TV and Amazon Prime in Canada now and makes its US debut via KindaTV on August 3rd.