Land of Women Review: Eva Longoria Dramedy Needs to Relax

Eva Longoria’s Land of Women Is a Feel-Good Dramedy That Tries To Do Too Much

It’s not news that Apple TV+ is home to some of TV’s best shows. From Slow Horses and For All Mankind to Bad Sisters and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the streaming service offers a variety of quality programming. But perhaps more important than its growing library of must-see shows is the knowledge that rough beginnings can be overcome with time and a willingness to evolve. It’s a lesson the platform’s newest series, Land of Women, should take to heart.

Inspired by Sandra Barneda’s best-selling novel La tierra de las mujeres and filmed almost entirely in Spanish and Catalan, the dramedy from Ramón Campos follows three generations of women uprooted from their lives of relative comfort and forced to start over through no fault of their own. The series wastes little time transporting viewers from the familiar yet indistinguishable streets of New York City, where wealthy wine connoisseur Gala (Eva Longoria, also an executive producer) spends money like the rest of us inhale cheap margaritas and nachos at happy hour (quickly, and without much thought), to the idyllic countryside of northern Spain. The reason for the necessary and quick departure is that Gala’s husband, Fred (James Purefoy), borrowed money from the wrong people, and he skips town once they come looking to recoup, leaving Gala holding the very expensive bag. Scared for her and her family’s safety, she packs what little she can of her once-privileged life into a suitcase, collects her aging mother Julia (Carmen Maura) and teenage daughter Kate (Victoria Bazúa), and flees to the one place the three women might have a chance at a new life: the small Spanish town of La Muga, from which her mother fled before Gala was even born.

What follows is a series of fairly predictable mishaps, from Gala being unable to rent a car with cash and needing to procure a clunker from someone at the airport, to crashing said car into a tractor hauling a trailer full of grapes, to discovering the beautiful family home she thought they were heading to had been sold without their knowledge (and to the hunky man hauling grapes, no less!). Add in losing the rest of their money, spending a night in jail for trespassing, and the fact no one in town is all that happy to see Julia, and it’s a wonder the women are able to find a moment’s peace, let alone a sense of normalcy in their adopted home.

And yet, they eventually do. When Kate, who is trans, is outed by the local doctor she seeks out for hormones, she finds a loyal friend in a young, ebullient woman from the village who not only encourages her to stand up for herself, but shows her that not everyone in their small town is a bigot. Gala, meanwhile, loses some of her initial arrogance and uses her knowledge of wine and the wine industry to help the reluctant Amat (Santiago Cabrera, the aforementioned hunk) turn the town’s wine cooperative into a successful and profitable business. It’s not an easy task, though, since the women of the town—who have been working the vineyards ever since the men went to battle in the Spanish Civil War—are as skeptical of Gala as they are of her mother, whose own sister, Mariona (Gloria Muñoz), wants nothing to do with her.

The reason for the town’s open hostility to its prodigal daughter plays out over the course of the first season’s six episodes, with flashbacks to Julia as a young woman and the close relationship she once shared with Mariona. Of the three central storylines, it’s Julia’s that anchors the show and gives it emotional weight. The fact she’s in the early stages of dementia makes revisiting her memories of La Muga and reconnecting with those she left behind all the more poignant, though a related storyline about the identity of Gala’s father is somewhat less intriguing.

Even less interesting still is the ongoing plot involving the men looking for Fred, and thus Gala. And this is where the show ultimately falters. Land of Women isn’t anything novel; it’s a comforting fish-out-of-water story about second chances, about starting over (or coming home, in Julia’s case) and finding one’s self along the way. There have been many women-centric series like it over the years, from The CW’s lighthearted and wacky, yet surprisingly heartfelt Hart of Dixie, to Netflix’s popular romantic drama Virgin River. But while the show is pleasantly familiar in its themes, it would also be stronger if it did a little less (a note that could, at times, also apply to Hart of Dixie and Virgin River).

In its current form, Land of Women is narratively and tonally unbalanced, attempting to navigate aspects of comedy, drama, romance, and crime thriller, usually within the same episode. It is at its best when it simply allows the women at its center to breathe, to be a family, to be free to express themselves. The moments when they look inside and to the past to find the joy in their present circumstances are some of the show’s strongest. But they don’t occur often enough, as the story must always give way to the threat of danger that acted as the impetus for the women to flee to Spain.

It’s easy to imagine a different version of the show, one in which the trio move under less dire circumstances, thus allowing them to exist in their new home without the constant threat of potential violence. It’s this melodrama and the attempt to wring comedy from it that ultimately holds back the feel-good series at the center from reaching its full potential. It doesn’t have the writing of something like Jane the Virgin, an award-winning telenovela made up of similar (though not the same) elements, to balance its seemingly disparate parts. But the pieces that do work are enjoyable. Longoria and Cabrera have enough chemistry to make you root for Gala and Amat’s inevitable romance, while Julia is flirtatious and mischievous but not malicious, bringing a lively sense of humor to the proceedings that makes her the show’s strongest building block.

The fact the series fully embraces its beautiful location and its local culture, and is filmed almost entirely in Spanish and Catalan, is yet another of its strengths. Unlike Netflix, Apple does not yet have a robust library of non-English language series, but if it wants to continue to compete in the streaming landscape, it will likely need to change that. The success of K-dramas and shows like Squid Game and Shōgun has revealed that American audiences are perhaps more willing to embrace international programming and subtitles than they used to be, which should work in Land of Women’s favor. But viewers also need to know there is a reason to return given the show’s unbalanced nature.

Should Land of Women earn a second season, it’d be nice to see the parts of the show that work—the emotional bonds between the women, the romances that have been set up—take precedence over Fred’s betrayal and its lasting consequences. That seems unlikely given the events of the finale. But much like the wine La Muga produced before Gala’s arrival, there are good elements here, someone just needs to know how to bring them together to create the perfect blend.

Land of Women premieres Wednesday, June 26th on Apple TV+.

Kaitlin Thomas is an entertainment journalist and TV critic. Her work has appeared in TV Guide, Salon, and Gold Derby, among other places. You can find her tweets about TV, sports, and Walton Goggins @thekaitling.

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Eva Longoria’s Land of Women Is a Feel-Good Dramedy That Tries To Do Too Much