Eva Longoria is not interested in easy. This is a woman, after all, who earned her masters degree in Chicano studies while on the set of “Desperate Housewives,” the series that made her a star. Since then, she’s wielded that stardom in wide-ranging ways to make a variety of projects happen — including her return to TV , Apple TV+’s “Land of Women.
” Set in the Catalan wine region, “ Land of Women ” stars Longoria as Gala, the wife of a shady businessman who must flee thugs in Manhattan with her daughter (Victoria Bazúa) and her mother (the great Carmen Maura) to start over in her mother’s hometown. The premise is fish-out-of-water, but you hardly realize it’s anything that ordinary given the specificity and nuance that Longoria and the whole team bring to the six episodes. Family secrets are uncovered, generational bonding ensues, a flirtation strikes up — and we learn more about winemaking than you’d expect from a dramedy.
“I felt like TV is so stressful,” Longoria told IndieWire. “It’s like the end of the world and the apocalypse. And then what happens if we get cyberattacked? And you’re like, this is all too real.
Can we just slow down a little bit? I wanted to use the characters to escape and really shoot somewhere that was blue skies and people would go, ‘Ooh, I want to go there.'” But just because the series is escapist for the audience doesn’t mean it was for Longoria. Though she doesn’t direct any of the episodes, she more .