Bonkbusters are out. Airport novels, spy thrillers, chick-lit romps, even cosy detective mysteries . . . don’t get spotted on the beach reading any of that this year.
Feelgood is the new fad. Publishers can’t get enough of tear-jerking, emotional stories with a splash of romance and a happy ending, with titles like The People On Platform 5 and A Wedding In Lake Como.
Television has been slow to catch up. Half of all dramas still seem to start with a woman in a nightdress fleeing through a forest at night, to escape an unfaithful husband, a serial killer or a wildfire — the very antithesis of feelgood.
But Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria has the recipe to change that, with her Apple TV+ serial Land Of Women. It’s ruthlessly calculated to make us smile as we well up with a touch of melancholy, while admiring the haute couture.
Eva Longoria’s Land of Women is ruthlessly calculated to make us smile as we well up with a touch of melancholy
Eva’s wardrobe bears the brunt of many jokes. If she (pictured, centre) isn’t falling into picturesque hillside pools in a tailored tweed one-piece, she’s being spattered with mud in a white chiffon trouser suit
In fact, Eva’s wardrobe bears the brunt of many jokes. If she isn’t falling into picturesque hillside pools in a tailored tweed one-piece, she’s being spattered with mud in a white chiffon trouser suit. And there’s no end of running in four-inch heels, a trick she performs with the grace of a giraffe in stilettos.
She plays Gala, a tough but glamorous Manhattan cookie whose husband does a midnight flit to avoid the Mafia debt collectors chasing $15 million and both his kneecaps.
Rather than hang around in New York to discuss repayment options, Gala also skips the country, with her teenage lesbian daughter, Kate (Victoria Bazua), and her slightly senile mother, Julia (Carmen Maura) . . . plus a suitcase of designer clothes and $50,000 taped to her underwear.
They head for the Spanish village where Julia was born, now run by a women’s collective, scraping a living with the annual grape harvest. The local vino is best used for unblocking drains, but it happens that Gala is an internationally acclaimed wine expert, so you should be able to see that happy ending fermenting nicely.
Before it arrives, there’ll be lots of family secrets to discover. Julia was a popular girl in her youth, which sets up a Mamma Mia! storyline: just which of the village elders is Gala’s long-lost papa?
Eva Longoria, Victoria Bazúa and Carmen Maura in Apple TV+ series Land of Women
Is it the police chief, now married to her aunt? Surely not the local priest, who blushes to the tip of his tonsure every time Julia smiles at him?
Stroppy Kate will also have to ‘find herself’, probably with the aid of the gamine garage mechanic who plasters the dashboard of her truck with pin-up girls.
Gala’s romantic future is already assured, after she crashed her car into a farmer’s tractor. He seems to find it all wryly amusing. She professes herself indifferent to his ‘salt-and-pepper George Clooney beard’, so she’s already in love — she just hasn’t realised yet.
The constant switching between English, Spanish and Catalan, sometimes in mid-sentence, is tiresome and requires a great many subtitles.
But don’t let that spoil things. What’s wrong with feeling good?
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk