Eva Longoria’s Escapist Charms

Nearly 20 years ago, the ABC drama Desperate Housewives introduced viewers to Gabrielle Solis, a glamorous former model played by Eva Longoria. Vain and ill-suited to suburban life, Gabrielle was the only Latina among the leading ladies of Wisteria Lane, a fact that the show established with a comical lack of subtlety. In the pilot, all of the housewives brought food to a wake for their recently deceased neighbor, and Gabrielle’s contribution was a “spicy paella,” revealed while ambiguously Latin-sounding music played in the background.

Desperate Housewives reliably shoehorned Gabrielle into well-worn stereotypes—most notably, the fiery Latina whose exotic sexual energy makes her irresistible to men. Still, the character was a consistently entertaining, sometimes even endearing, presence in the mid-aughts TV landscape in part because of her unabashed desire for the finer things in life. Ahead of the show’s 20th anniversary, Desperate Housewives appreciation has blossomed across social media, bringing Gabrielle Solis and her Juicy Couture tracksuits to a whole new generation of Y2K-fashion-obsessed viewers. At the same time, Longoria has a new leading role built around lifestyle envy: On the Apple TV+ miniseries Land of Women, Longoria plays Gala Scott, a wealthy New York City mom who’s just opened a fancy new wine shop. In many ways, Gala feels like a more grown-up version of Gabrielle, dispensing with many of those frustrating tropes without losing the glossy, aspirational pleasures that made Desperate Housewives so fun to watch.

Land of Women kicks off by throwing Gala into an admittedly undesirable situation: Two hit men show up at the opening celebration for her wine shop and inform her that her husband owes their boss $15 million. Fearing for her life, and unable to reach her husband, she flees the U.S. with her daughter, Kate (Victoria Bazúa), and mother, Julia (Carmen Maura). The show, an adaptation of the Spanish journalist Sandra Barneda’s novel La Tierra de Las Mujeres, spends the bulk of its run time following the trio after they make it to Catalonia, Spain. There, in Julia’s fictional hometown of La Muga, the three women attempt to evade the mobsters and get answers about the financial misdealings that landed the family in trouble.

As high-stakes as that may sound, Land of Women doesn’t play out like a heist film or a gripping caper. When I finished watching the six-part series, half of which is now streaming, I found myself wanting to immediately revisit Under the Tuscan Sun. And sure enough, the effervescent Diane Lane film about a woman who impulsively buys a villa in the Italian countryside was one of the references that Longoria cited in an early conversation with the showrunner Ramón Campos: “I called Ramón and I was like, ‘Come on, write me something in Spain, like in the wine country, that’s Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love–y,’” Longoria, who is also an executive producer on Land of Women, recently told The Hollywood Reporter.

Since Desperate Housewives ended in 2012, Longoria has taken on other acting roles, produced several projects, and directed a feature film. She’s also launched a clothing brand, and lent her likeness to ad campaigns for other lifestyle companies. Land of Women builds on these interests: Longoria has said she wanted to make a series that would contrast the glut of dystopian programming that mirrors real-life horrors, and the show certainly delivers on this comforting escapism. Part of what makes the series feel so tranquil is its predictability: Gala experiences just about every fish-out-of-water cliché imaginable once the women make it to Spain, beginning when she crashes her dilapidated rental car into a very attractive man’s truck. None of the ensuing chaos feels especially realistic, but it’s all delightful. And when Gala gets an opportunity to flex her wine expertise later in the series, Longoria becomes especially charming as she makes amusing pronouncements about things like the acidity of Spanish grapes.

[Read: The many faces of the “wine mom”]

Even when the characters face dire circumstances, Land of Women is visually calming: The show’s dreamy vistas easily distract from the looming dangers. At times, Land of Women feels like a montage of conversations in Pinterest-ready settings—a lush vineyard, a small-town café, a secret hillside hiding place that Julia retreats to when she needs to be alone. In the airy kitchen of a lovingly restored old home, Gala even cooks a traditional Spanish meal (unfortunately not a paella, spicy or otherwise). More than the criminal scheme that forced their journey here, Land of Women is concerned with how Gala, Julia, and Kate develop—and how the warm backdrop of Spanish wine country helps them grow together, too. For Gala, leaving behind a city of status-obsessed workaholics gives her the freedom to focus on the actual craft of wine-making—and her wardrobe reflects the newfound lightness. In New York, she wore shift dresses and stilettos; after some time in La Muga, where that attire is ridiculously impractical, Gala dons jeans and sneakers.

The character changes aren’t all superficial. Gala also grows more comfortable speaking Spanish, a shift that’s particularly interesting because this is also Longoria’s first time doing so on- screen. Raised in a ninth-generation Tejano family, Longoria didn’t learn Spanish until her mid-30s, several seasons into Desperate Housewives. (Gabrielle largely distanced herself from her Mexican roots, which she associated with poverty, and the character rarely even attempted Spanglish.) More than half of Land of Women’s dialogue is in Spanish (with English subtitles available), and of the three lead characters, Gala’s mother is the only one played by a Spanish actor, making for interesting variations in their speaking rhythms and pronunciations. Even accounting for the differences between the Castilian variation that Julia speaks and the Mexican Spanish that the other two speak, their ability to communicate in another language does help keep them safe from the English-speaking hit men. But more often, Land of Women uses language—and what gets lost in translation—to explore the characters’ relationships to one another and to their cultural identities. (By casting Latin American actors in roles originally written for Spanish characters, Land of Women also reverses the common industry trend of casting white European actors as Latinos.)

Land of Women is mostly solid and agreeable; it likely won’t blow anyone away with the twists in its storyline, or with the sharpness of its writing. But the show doesn’t present itself as prestige TV, or even as a slick tale of a scorned wife’s revenge. It knows that viewers will be tuning in primarily for Longoria—and for the refreshing views of wine country, which make it all the more enjoyable to relax with. Those of us living in the real world may never experience Land of Women’s improbable utopia, but there’s still something reassuring about watching Longoria stumble into it stiletto-first.