Has there have been a multimedia venture more immediately successful than last week’s Field Of Dreams baseball game between the Yankees and the White Sox? Not only did America’s favorite team get crushed by Chicago’s least-favorite team with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth—an accidental nod to the fact that the first walk-off home run that the Sox ever got against the Yankees was hit by “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in 1919, with Jackson being the guy whose ghost shows up in a little Kevin Costner film called Field Of Dreams—but the game also inspired a huge upswing in Field Of Dreams DVD and Blu-ray sales. It also pulled in the best ratings a regular season Major League Baseball game has gotten in over 15 years
Now the (baseball) hits are just going to keep coming, with Peacock announcing today in a press release that it has granted a straight-to-series order to a Field Of Dreams TV show that will be written and executive produced by Parks And Recreation co-creator Michael Schur. The series will reportedly “reimagine the mixture of family, baseball, Iowa, and magic that makes the movie so enduring and beloved” (Big Iowa is definitely lining somebody’s pockets to make sure the state gets mentioned in there, right?), and NBCUniversal’s Television And Streaming President Lisa Katz added that this kind of “whimsical and grounded” story is “where Mike Schur excels.”
The movie, while not especially serious, is also not known for being super funny, so it’ll be interesting to see if Schur introduces more of his comedic sensibilities into this thing. It will also be interesting to see who they cast as not-Kevin Costner… though Costner would probably be willing to do it. Nobody’s ever made any kind of baseball thing without at least running it by him first.