Paramount Plus’ new show from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan crafts a taut but simplistic spy show about women who spy for CIA assassins.
Taylor Sheridan’s TV empire conjures up the image of a man on the vast plains of the West, knocking back a (domestic) beer and grunting ’murica with a mixture of admiration and sadness, before turning his eyes back to a weathered copy of one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated novels. Taylor Sheridan knows America better than you do: its might and its majesty, its joy and sorrow, who it celebrates, and most importantly, who it does not.
In the new Paramount Plus series Special Ops: Lioness, Sheridan turns his contemplative gaze to the women of the armed forces. Supposedly based on a real-life CIA task force, Lioness follows a team that places female operatives in the lives of women close to targets for assassination. It’s a nasty subject, the morality of which the show briefly acknowledges while breezily asserting its necessity and launching headfirst into the meat of the show: a character-driven spy thriller.
Lioness orbits around two women: Joe (Zoe Saldaña), who leads the Lioness team, and new recruit Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), a driven woman with nowhere to go but the Marines when her abusive boyfriend finally goes too far.
