‘Land of Women’: Eva Longoria’s New Show Is ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ With Mobsters
When she’s not directing movies about Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Eva Longoria’s niche is glamorous, high-energy dramedies. It’s what catapulted her to fame in Desperate Housewives, and it’s how she tried to launch a second act with the short-lived NBC sitcom Telenovela. Now she’s bringing that glossy energy back to TV in her new Apple TV+ series Land of Women—a watchable, if imbalanced limited series about a family of women escaping to Spanish wine country to flee a crime boss.
Loosely based on Sandra Barneda’s 2015 novel La Tierra de las Mujeres and unfolding in a mix of Spanish and English, Land of Women has been specifically engineered to suit Longoria’s zippy comedic skill set. (She’s also an executive producer.) She plays Gala Scott, a wealthy New York wine-shop owner living a dream life of privilege and luxury—until two thugs come knocking on her door, demanding the $15 million that her husband owes their boss. With her bank accounts drained and her husband nowhere to be found, Gala hawks her jewelry, grabs her teenage daughter Kate (Victoria Bazua) and her aging mother Julia (Carmen Maura), and jets off to the last place anyone would think to look for them: her mom’s childhood home in the tiny remote town of La Muga, Spain.
It's a homecoming that, improbably enough, sits somewhere between a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie and a quirky Pedro Almodóvar melodrama. With her high-strung attitude, Gala slots right into the Hallmark mold of a prissy big-city-gal who needs to find her true self in a small town, complete with an enemies-to-lovers flirtation with hunky vineyard manager Amat (Santiago Cabrera). But the show also embraces a more wistful, whimsical tone as Julia reconnects to a homeland she hasn’t revisited in over four decades. Sun-drenched flashbacks contrast Julia’s free-spirited youth with the more grounded but no less vivacious person she’s become as she’s gotten older.