‘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.

If Longoria is the steady, polished hand keeping the show afloat, Maura is its vibrant beating heart. As in her signature collaborations with Almodóvar (most notably Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Volver), Maura brings a comedic playfulness without losing a sense of emotional truth. She and Longoria are well-matched by newcomer Bazua, who blends impulsivity and maturity into a believable portrait of teenage girlhood.

Indeed, the six-episode series, premiering June 26, is best when it’s zeroing in on its leading ladies and the way they’re changed, Under the Tuscan Sun-style, by their time in La Muga. The central trio have a breezy chemistry, and co-creator Ramón Campos finds a nice blend of drama and comedy for their respective storylines: Julia bumbles her way through making amends with the people she hurt in her past; Kate strives to find her place as a gay trans teen in a gossip-filled small town; and Gala meets her match in a wine collective owned by women who aren’t too interested in her American business ideas.

The trouble comes when Land of Women moves beyond its character-based storytelling and tries to keep up its high-stakes crime plot. A pair of enforcers played by Jim Kitson and Amaury Nolasco are neither funny enough to amp up the comedy nor scary enough to raise the stakes. Land of Women too often gets tied up in knots with unnecessarily convoluted storylines about where and how Gala can make back the money she needs to pay off her husband’s debt. The pleasure of the show comes from hanging out in the gorgeous vineyards and quirky traditions of Spanish wine country, but Land of Women doesn’t seem to trust that’s enough to keep audiences invested without something more whiz bang in the mix.

It doesn’t help that Land of Women clearly has eyes on a potential second season, which leaves the back half of this first season feeling unmoored as it struggles to figure out how to wrap up its main plot while also leaving threads open for the future. The show rushes through some storylines way too quickly while leaving others frustratingly unfinished. Not even the sparkling score by composer Federico Jusid is enough to hold the disparate parts together.

Still, those missteps feel less like foundational flaws than they do matters of calibration. Like a barrel of wine that needs more time to age, the various tones of Land of Women haven’t totally melded together yet. But it’s a vintage with promise, one that goes down as easily as a summer sangria.