Eva Longoria stars as a woman who flees to a small Spanish town with her mother and daughter in Land of Women
Gala (Eva Longoria), a high-society New Yorker, thinks she’s got it made. She is finally opening her own wine store in Manhattan. Her wealthy husband Fred (James Purefoy) is signing the cheques for her life and her wardrobe. Her daughter Kate (Victoria Bazùa) is back on speaking terms with her, since enrolling in boarding school. Everything is, in fact, just wonderful . . . until the day Gala’s husband runs away, leaving her to deal with his $15-million debt to a shady gangster.
What’s a family matriarch to do? Gala gathers the troops — her mother Julia (Carmen Maura) and Kate — a nd escapes to a charming wine town in northern Spain that her own mother ran away from five decades earlier. What ensues is love, chaos and a deep intergenerational bond between women who think they have nothing in common.
Longoria, who serves as executive producer for the show, had just a few requests for series creator Ramon Campos, with whom she had worked on ABC drama Grand Hotel. “I’ve been a big fan of Ramon’s writing and his shows, and I was like, ‘Ramon, write me something in Spain. I just want to shoot in Spain,’” she says. “I should have been more specific. He came back with this, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was fun and amazing. But the series was situated in the middle of nowhere.”
It is in the small town of La Muga, in the beautiful Spanish countryside, that both relationships and individuals flourish. For Longoria — Spanish wine and location aside — this was the draw of the project. “I love that this show explores three generations of women: My relationship with my mother, my relationship with my daughter, my relationship with myself and why I made the choices I made,” she says. “In life, taking an emotional inventory of all the choices you’ve made is rarely done. On this show, you get to see Gala really have this arc. Where she ends up is a completely different person from where she begins.”
Gala’s daughter, Kate, is played by Mexican newcomer Victoria Bazùa, in a role that promises to take viewers by surprise. In Kate, just as in Gala, Campos wanted to explore the evolution of identity. “It’s important to speak about teenagers and how their lives are changing all the time — how us fathers or mothers can understand the changes in their lives,” says Campos. “I think the relationship between Gala and Kate is beautiful because Gala understands what happened with Kate, but at the same time it’s hard for her.” Their storyline is an exploration of coming-of-age, which in this case is a tough journey for both mother and daughter. “There’s everything that happens with puberty and emotions, and layered on top of that is something else,” says Longoria. “Gala struggles to make the connection with her own daughter but through the series it blossoms into this beautiful mother-daughter relationship.”
Campos was also eager to show what aging looks and feels like, contrary to what younger generations believe will happen when the years start to pile on. “All of our mothers are discovering a new life,” he says. “When we were young, our parents were old people, but now 80-year-olds do normal things, like sports. And they [have sex], sometimes!” On the series, even Gala is taken by surprise by her mother’s long and rich life, which she discovers once she gets to know Julia better. “Julia has had such a full and fun past. Even her daughter feels like, ‘I don’t even know who you are, mom,’” says Longoria. “All of these things are revealed because her mother’s been lying so much, but to discover that she was that person is kind of refreshing.”
The series plays out in both English and Spanish, a pop-cultural evolution that today feels natural, but wasn’t always the norm. “I remember there was such an allergy to subtitles, back in the day,” says Longoria. “I think streaming blew open the doors to content from all over the world. When you talk about universal themes, like our show, it crosses borders and language. Everybody understands mothers and daughters. Everybody understands love. Everybody understands heartbreak. I think this show is an example of how we live our lives, so the fact that we go from English to Spanish to Catalan is very authentic.”
In Land of Women, family and cultural dynamics are packaged in humour, offering levity and charm even when subject matters are deep. “I do think this show is escapism,” says Longoria. “In a time where the world is a little upside down and the news is so depressing —I even feel like we had this wave in television of dystopia — this is the opposite. This is wish fulfillment. It’s blue skies, it’s an adventure. It’s family. For me to tell this story in this moment in time is not only special, but it’s going to be a welcome dose of fun TV.”
Land of Women, streaming Wednesday, June 26 on Apple TV+