When you think of California’s wine country, Napa’s usually the first city that comes to mind. However, ABC’s new primetime series Promised Land chose Sonoma as the base of operations for the wine-making families at the heart of the drama.
The first season of what ABC describes as an “epic, generation-spanning drama about two Latinx families vying for wealth and power” debuts on Monday, January 24, 2022 at 10pm ET/PT. In support of its upcoming premiere, ABC hosted a virtual Television Critics Association panel featuring Promised Land cast members John Ortiz, Cecilia Suárez, Bellamy Young, Christina Ochoa, Andres Velez, and Katya Martín, as well as showrunner/executive producer Matt Lopez and executive producer Maggie Malina.
Discussing the inspiration for Promised Land, Matt Lopez confessed he grew up a huge fan of Dallas. Lopez even joked that J.R. Ewing was his spirit animal, and it’s obvious that nighttime soap was one of the inspirations for Promised Land. However, it wasn’t the only inspiration for this 2022 primetime drama.
“Somehow in my travels I missed East of Eden. I read it with my daughter, I guess, a year and a half ago now. If East of Eden was just a logline, you would think it’s like a primetime, 10 o’clock soap. And yet, in terms of what it’s going for in terms of the complexity of the characters, the richness of the themes, and so on, it’s striving for so much more. And that’s, I think, what Promised Land really tries to do,” explained Lopez.
It wasn’t until Lopez had created the fictional world of Promised Land that he realized just how competitive the real world of winemaking actually is. “I’ll say one interesting thing that I’ve learned is as I first had the first inspiration and inkling for this, you know, you’re creating this hypercompetitive world and I guess I sort of assumed I was making it up. And then you start to research and do the due diligence on the wine world and you quickly discover it’s as competitive as you see on TV. It’s very, very cutthroat. And it’s just a cool world that I don’t think we’ve seen on television before,” said Lopez.
Christina Ochoa loves the fact that with “Veronica Sandoval,” the writers have given her a multi-layered character who’s relatable and feels authentic to bring to life.
“I really do believe that most of the very complex, nuanced, and characters that are full of subtleties the way that Matt and his writers have crafted into the show taps into something that is very human for all of us. I know that looking just at the members of the cast in this little panel, I can tell you every single one of them has that. They have very rich lives. And the idea of portraying that has been the thing that I’ve gravitated towards the most,” explained Ochoa. “Veronica, in particular, for me was someone who we hadn’t seen, especially on primetime television. So, I think that seeing a Latin woman, Stanford, MBA educated, with complexities and a family life and all of that together was something that I had to do, and I would fight tooth and nail for.”
Bellamy Young recently finished up a two-season run on Prodigal Son and was actually a late addition to the Promised Land cast in the role of “Margaret Honeycroft.” The pilot had already been shot by the time Young got involved with the series, and she was able to watch it before filming her first scene.
“You’re usually banded together, kind of fumbling in the dark, trying to tell the same story and find it together. I, sadly, got to miss that bonding experience, but I got the pleasure of watching this pilot and seeing this story and seeing these performances. And also, as an actor, watching it like a symphony and feeling like the bassoon, right? And just, like, hearing my line in the symphony and exactly where I wanted to land that. And it’s been an experience that has been absolutely unprecedented in my life,” said Young.
Cecilia Suárez stars as “Lettie Sandoval,” matriarch of the wealthy vineyard-owning Sandoval family. Matt Lopez says the series is Lettie’s journey, and Lettie is the heart and soul of the family.
“I think the thing I appreciate the most about the way Matt has created this character is the fact that this is a woman that is not only a mother or a partner, a wife, she’s also a full woman with desires, with doubts, with complexities, with contradictions, and that is hard to find,” said Suarez.
ABC’s Promised Land is a fresh take on the “pursuit of the American dream” story told via characters who’ve been underrepresented on television. Lopez spoke about what that means and why that’s important in 2022.
”In terms of what I think makes Promised Land maybe a little different or why the time is right for Promised Land, I think it’s a blend of, on the one hand, timeless themes of ambition and power that are almost Shakespearean and, at the same time, a very current timeliness,” said Lopez. “Obviously, the immigration issue is at the forefront of people’s minds. And I think shining a light on that not to sort of take a side in anything that passes for an immigration debate in this country but to just depict the pursuit of the American dream in all its beauty but, at the same time, all its costs, I think, speaks to the now.
I think audiences will respond to it. It’s a show that plays and delivers the goods on the soap in all those sorts of juicy, twisty elements, but I think also it’s our ambition to say something about the times in which we’re living and, on the most basic level, about the lives of these rich and complex characters.”
Lopez believes it’s important to have not just a majority Latinx cast but also a predominately Latinx crew coming together to create Promised Land. “What I found is separate and apart from a matter of very well-intended desires to be inclusive and to have a big tent, what I have found is it’s just made the material better,” said Lopez. “What I found is that by having a lot of Latino and Latina members behind the camera, on the writing staff, there’s a level of personal investment and that filters through in the material. There’s a passion for telling these stories.”
Lopez continued: “The first time I saw it was when we were casting, where we had actors who would come in and say, ‘My parents were fruit pickers in Santa Paula. I’ve never seen their story on screen before. Thank you.’ Or the other extreme where we would have actors that would say, ‘Thank you for showing this extremely successful, unapologetically wealthy Latino family that’s not in the cartel.’ And we would see these actors and you look at their IMDB page and it’s cartel, cartel, cartel. So, it’s really great to be able to tell a story that doesn’t fall into those tropes.
But I’ll say also this too…the immigrant experience is broader than just the Latino experience. I’ve seen time and again how this has resonated. One day on set, our stunt coordinator on the pilot, this lovely guy, Danny – first-generation Vietnamese American – came up to me and he was emotional. He was like, ‘This is my parents’ story. They didn’t come over the wall. They came in a boat.’ But it is such a fundamentally American story.
I like to say that Promised Land is a Latino story, but it’s an American journey. And that’s very much the story we want to tell.”
“I think what Matt said resonates with everyone,” said Ochoa. “The beauty of what Matt and Maggie have done, and the writers, is every single story in Promised Land is both universal and highly, highly personal. I don’t know how they do that. I don’t know how they’ve managed to do that.
But for me, the thing that I notice the least normally on camera and on TV, especially primetime – so kudos to ABC for breaking that – is heterodox thinking. Every immigrant is different. Every story is different. Everyone has a personal connection to these characters, but the diversity of thought, the diversity of perspective within an entirely Latin cast or an entirely Latin family and between these little groups, there is such a difference between Lettie’s perspective or Joe’s perspective or Antonio and Veronica. Everyone has such a different point of view and seeing that represented, where there’s no common denominator, that to me is real diversity. Diversity within a group, diversity within an ensemble, and diversity within a cast.”
John Ortiz (“Joe Sandoval” ) has worked as an actor for more than three decades yet despite his impressive filmography, Promised Land is the first production in which he was offered a lead role. He’s proud of the series and of the story it tells.
“The human component is something that speaks to me, given the structure and the extremes and the stakes of where we’re at but also some of the issues that we hear over and over again. Sometimes when they’re depicted or they try to be explored, they just kind of become about the issues, you know, and you forget about the people. You forget about the things that move us, the things that we want to see when we see anything on a screen or in life – and that’s to connect. That’s to relate to each other, for each other, and not just to hear yourself speak,” said Ortiz. “That’s what moves me. That’s what I want to see when I see something.”
Executive producer Maggie Malina finished up the TCA panel with high praise for the cast and the cohesive group that’s formed working on Promised Land. “This cast, watching them come together whether they were the first people cast or is recently joining as Bellamy, they are a familia. It is our shorthand on the set. It is the word on our location signs. It is what we refer to one another onset, offset, on our text chains, and it’s an honor to be a part of this familia.”
