Slo Pitch is Going to the Show
What started as an OUTtvgo web series five years ago has been promoted to the big leagues. We talk with Slo Pitch creators Karen Knox and Gwenlyn Cumyn about reuniting the team to take their LGBTQ softball series to Crave.
You don’t need a lot of money to make people laugh.
A story about a team of underdogs, great writing, and a brilliant cast of comedic actors will do the trick.
Karen Knox, Gwenlyn Cumyn and J Stevens believed that idea when they co-created the micro-budget series Slo Pitch, an LGBTQ comedy focused on a beer-league softball team (the cleverly named Brovaries) consisting of queer and non-binary players who aren’t the most athletically gifted but know how to have a good time.
Slo Pitch began as a short-form web series on OUTtvgo in 2020, drawing dedicated fans with its Parks and Recreation meets The L Word vibe. The trio knew they had a winning formula, and so did an assortment of funders — including the Canada Media Fund (CMF), Bell Media and Elliot Page’s PageBoy Productions — that stepped up to co-produce and reboot the show that will air as a 10-episode series on Crave in the spring of 2026.
In addition to writing and creating Slo Pitch, Knox and Cumyn also star, with Stevens directing.
Knox plays Boris, a German immigrant obsessed with beer and finding a woman to marry so she’s not deported, while Cumyn is Ann, a bisexual flirt juggling romantic partners while rooming with the Brovaries’ captain, Joanne (Kirsten Rasmussen), who is determined to see her team defeat their archrivals, the Toronto Blue Gays.
Knox and Cumyn were in Toronto, having recently wrapped production, when we caught up by phone.
How did the idea for Slo Pitch come together?
Cumyn: Knox and I went to George Brown Theatre School together a decade ago. We had made a web series, Barbelle, together that J had seen. J had the idea for Slo Pitch because they had been on an Aussie rules team, which had been full of drama. So together we developed this idea of a slo-pitch team of mostly queer, mostly female, players because we had so many friends who play on rec league teams who also have really dramatic, comedic stories. There’s a lot to mine from that world.
Tell us about your characters.
Cumyn: Ann is a slutty bisexual. We're reclaiming the trope [laughs]. She thinks that she’s hot sh-t. She's a sick bartender who can pick anybody up, or at least that's how she acts. And in this first season she really contends with the mess that she's made on and off the field.
Knox: I love Boris, this funny, really raucous, horny, crazy woman. And not too much of a spoiler, but she has a real relationship in this 10-part series and it's beautiful and so real and so funny.
The last of Slo Pitch’s two online seasons hit the web back in 2022. How did it feel to revisit the characters and get the production team back together for the reboot?
Knox: It felt like all the stars aligned in this beautiful way to bring back the vast majority of people who previously had no money but worked hard and made something pretty good on our web series. To get to do it on a bigger stage, to spend even more time together and to have a set that was even more comfortable, because we had a little bit more money to make sure that everybody was appropriately taken care of, it just felt awesome.
Does a bigger budget mean bigger dreams or bigger headaches, figuring out how to allocate the funds?
Cumyn: Definitely bigger dreams for us. You know, it's still Canadian television so it's not like we're working with a Game of Thrones budget here [laughs]. And honestly, it felt like the perfect stepping stone for us. Maybe in the web series we were living beyond our means, and now we are living within our means. Not that we wouldn't take more. But we got to work with two cameras on set, which was great. Our art department has always gone above and beyond, but I hope they felt a little more financially free to do what they wanted to do.
Knox: Honestly, it's so nice to be able to pay people a wage that is appropriate for them. With the digital series you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. People are getting paid, but it's not enough with the state of the economy right now. It's just so nice to be able to come to work and know that people are taken care of and, honestly, it helped my shoulders drop a little bit.
What I love about the series is that it is based in queer culture, but it resonates beyond that, hitting on sports, relationships, and work culture.
Knox: Right. We all agreed when we were in the writers’ room that we're not setting out to make a queer show. We're just doing what reflects our own lives. That's what this is. These people are who I see in the streets. These are the people that I hang out with. I wish for a world where we move past representation and it's just normalization. Yes, there’s a specificity to the humour, but we really wanted to make it so that it didn't feel like an inside joke. Here’s a story that everyone could relate to that wasn't preachy. It’s just a stupid, fun, horny, chaotic sports show. And to me that was like the most radical thing that we could do.
Cumyn: We want audiences to have a good time. The world is a very scary place right now and politics are really heated. And we just want the show to feel like a breath of fresh air. And I think it was magical to be shooting the show while the Blue Jays were in the World Series. It really felt like a very good omen, despite the loss. It illustrated for us that sports can be such a unifier, and we saw the Jays bring an entire country together. That's what we want Slo Pitch to feel like. Not to be cheesy, but despite our differences we can get on the field and hit some balls with bats and all that disappears.
