Stream On: Deadlier than the male. ‘Lioness’
Lioness follows the life of Joe while she attempts to balance her personal and professional life as the tip of the CIA's spear in the war on terror.
Restless Taylor Sheridan is hard at work. Tulsa King is uploading Season Two; Yellowstone’s next season is coming Sunday, I believe, and he has another series, Landman (trailer) with Billy Bob Thornton and John Hamm on the horizon. Since I strive to avoid ads, I’ve just discovered Sheridan’s Lioness, below.
LIONESS aka Special Ops: Lioness
/Streaming /Amazon /😎78%😌82% /Trailer /2023 /TVMA
"Special Ops: Lioness, inspired by an actual US Military program, follows the life of Joe (Zoe Saldaña) while she attempts to balance her personal and professional life as the tip of the CIA's spear in the war on terror. The Lioness Program, overseen by Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) and Donald Westfield (Michael Kelly), enlists an aggressive Marine Raider named Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) to operate undercover alongside Joe among the power brokers of State terrorism in the CIA's efforts to thwart the next 9/11." (The official Paramount+ synopsis)
Before the first credits roll, a young woman in an ISIS compound in Syria, in burqa and hijab, pulls up her cellphone and dials out. “I’m blown! They saw the cross!” On the other end of the line, in an American military base, “Joe” barks, “Cross?”
“My tattoo.”
Joe is about to begin an extraction operation when she hears her operative scream and the line goes dead.
The series bears Taylor Sheridan’s marks: clean cinematography, all-business action, and an ocean of testosterone. But wait—many of the tough guys here are women, and are they tough! The next scenes after the opening credits roll depict two episodes from Joe’s rough life before she discovered the Marines.
Zoe Saldaña has a good time with her character, Joe, and we soon find out that she’s a complicated character—not flawless. Joe is now (some years later than her pre-Marines life) married to Neal, a pediatric oncology surgeon (which comes with its own drama) and they have two daughters, one a difficult age, and the other, a really difficult age.
Episode Two (“The Beating”) visits a new Lioness operative, Cruz, who is assigned to befriend the rich daughter of a pragmatic terrorist who has a unique motive that might lessen his vulnerability. So we’re transported to a high-end jewelry store in an international city for some scenes, before Episode Two takes an unappetizing turn, but a necessary one, which will grab you.
In two episodes we’ve had a handful of locations (when a show begins in the desert, I worry. I needn’t have) from an ISIS compound to a wealthy suburban home, then a hospital, a high-end jewelry store in Kuwait City, the streets of New York City … and a “survive, evade, resist, escape” exercise on a remote island.
In Episode Three we get some scenes on a Chesapeake Bay bridge, as Cruz goes to infiltrate a pool party at a mansion on the shore of the Bay—and then onward to the Hamptons in Ep. 4. It’s as glamorous as some Hitchcock movies.
Conceptually Lioness reminds me of The Unit, a CBS network potboiler from David Mamet about an army “secret unit,” which is pretty good itself. But in The Unit, all the female characters are wives and girlfriends. Sheridan has been over this ground before: Joe reminds me of Emily Blunt’s character tough-as-nails FBI agent Kate Macer in Sicario, which Sheridan also wrote. (He wrote or co-wrote every episode of Lioness.)
And as with most Sheridan shows, Lioness got me: I binged the first season in two days. Two seasons are up currently, and I’m hooked.
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.