Season 2, titled SUNLAND, by screenwriter, journalist and novelist Charlie Haas, unfolds the brief desert flowering of a group of German Expressionist artists, musicians, and free spirits, c.1914, who come to Southern California, “the America of America,” to start the world over. They’re fleeing cops, sexual norms, city life, the oncoming world war, and the Internet of their time — the telegraph, telephone, and movies. They’re making wild new music and practicing naked farming. They worship the sun. Based loosely on history, and told through the rotating voices of a family from Berlin who leave everything behind in hope of a saner life—middling violinist-dreamer Anna, factory worker Gerhard, prototypical flowerchild Lilli, and budding tech futurist Benji—the four main characters branch from the fields of San Bernardino to the real estate tracts of burgeoning LA, at once wrestling with and setting in motion the longings and questions that have continued to beguile and bedevil every American generation since. Begins July 2022.

CREDITS:
Music for the trailer is "Lullaby of Sunland," composed and performed by Ben Rifkin.

Charlie Haas’s screenwriting credits include Over the Edge, Tex, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, New West, The Threepenny Review, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, along with many other journals. Haas’s previous novel, The Enthusiast, was published by HarperPerennial in 2009. Follow his Twitter feed at: @Charlie_Haas.

Podcast art by Ryan Longnecker.
Sound production by Ben Rifkin.