Special Ops: Lioness, the latest Paramount+ show from the prolific cowboy whisperer extraordinaire Taylor Sheridan, opens cold on a job gone wrong. Joe (Zoe Saldana), head of a covert CIA operation tasked with flipping the mothers, wives, girlfriends, and acquaintances of male terrorist leaders, is trying to get her undercover operative out of a terrorist compound in Syria before the whole thing goes up in smoke. Her team, locked and loaded, circles the compound in a chopper, awaiting orders.
But the operative is compromised. Her cover’s been blown by the cross tattoo under her arm. Joe’s ready to give the extraction order, but as soon as she hears the screams of her contact through the phone in her hand, she makes another decision.
“She was dead either way,†Joe will tell her superior, Donald Westfield (Michael Kelly), in a debrief. “I chose to protect my team and the sanctity of our operation.†The infernal, impossible decision-making that comes with every geopolitical conflict, every covert op, every act of violence, every long tail of suffering that follows.
In the immediate aftermath of the drone strike, Joe stands alone atop a CIA outpost and rips her tactical vest off to breathe — eyes as weary as they are steely, the look of someone who knows all too well the devastation of not just losing someone in your care, but knowing when the chips are down, you have what it takes to end their life in an instant.
Special ops is hell.
“There are lots of places where a way of life that existed for 150 years is slamming against a new way of life, but the challenges are completely different,†Sheridan told THR in a lengthy profile detailing his meteoric rise to the top of the TV world. “There are a lot of places you can tell this story.†The beauty and the brutality of the proverbial frontier — at its center, the distant, laser-focused badass with a chewy moral core, feeling deeply and acting quickly for family, friends, and duty. Insatiable drive — the ultimate strength and the ultimate weakness in a world ruled by the machinations of the powerful.
Regardless of where you sit with the Taylor Sheridan oeuvre, there’s no denying this guy altered the course of the streaming era and, for both good and ill, revived “the western†for a modern post-peak TV audience. Eschewing writers’ rooms to pound all his scripts out himself from a custom-built writing chamber at his gargantuan Four Sixes Ranch in Texas, Sheridan’s attempts at cowboy poeticism don’t always translate to honest-to-goodness poignancy. This guy digs his heels in and takes big swings, hits and misses aplenty. But much like his protagonists, Sheridan’s dedication to the attempt imbues his stuff with an emotional musicality and familiar cowboy lyricism. His storytelling sensibilities are decidedly American, and in a relatively short time, they’ve proliferated the prestige TV landscape in a string of shows that look like HBO, sound like Lonesome Dove, and sometimes even feel like Apocalypse Now (though that last part is more applicable to Sheridan’s trilogy of neo-western films: Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River) — actively crossing the very red-state/blue-state lines that Sheridan’s fans, as well as detractors, have imposed upon his stuff from the outset.
In this sense, the premiere episode of Lioness is Sheridan in a nutshell: a western-tinged spy thriller for dads and dad-show enthusiasts like yours truly in every state. We meet our second lead, Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), at a breaking point. Her “origin story†plays out like some elongated Marine recruitment commercial, complete with working-class-struggle porn and weird, racially tinged stereotyping cloaked in girl-boss empowerment. But the thing about Sheridan’s work is there’s a lot of space for the actors performing it to juice it up with real emotional heft. Something about the simplicity of the beats, all art aspiring to music and whatnot. Cruz is finishing up another late shift at a burger shack in Oklahoma City and comes home to a cartoonishly abusive boyfriend. When a scuffle breaks out, and he hits Cruz in the face, De Oliveira plays the moment that follows with precision: Her voice says, “I’m sorry†to her boyfriend, but her eyes say to the camera, I’m gonna fuck this guy up and get outta here tomorrow.
The next morning, Cruz hits her boyfriend with a frying pan and bolts. He chases her through the neighborhood and straight into, wouldn’t ya know it, a Marine recruitment office or some shit. “It’s between me and her,†Cruz’s BF retorts when this fucking yoked recruitment officer with a booming voice comes in out of nowhere. “Now it’s between you and the United States Marines.â€
Now comes this exchange between Cruz and the recruitment officer that’s so insane it made me, like, wheeze-laugh but also pump an adrenaline-fueled fist:
“You do that to his face?â€
“I cheated. I used a frying pan.â€
“In war, if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.â€
“I’ve been at war my whole life, then.â€
“Well, you came to the right place.â€
There’s an absurd, John Milius–type pitch to this whole thing — a “rah-rah America†vibe undercut by a clear acknowledgment (up to you how conscious or unconscious) of the way the brutality of American life funnels capable, underprivileged people into the imperial war machine. It’s a thematic duality that fuels much of our post–Vietnam War stories — murky waters through which Sheridan, episode director John Hillcoat, and the principal performers seem especially game to swim in.
Next, we get one of these why-are-you-here/call-to-action-type deals where Cruz crushes her Marine Corps. physical fitness test and scores exceptionally high on the written exam. Plucked from the obscurity of potential recruits by the officer in charge or whatever (sorry, I don’t know “Marines†and don’t care enough to try), she’s presented with a clear path to channel all that exceptional rage and skill. “We are the strong. We protect the weak. We are merciless in that endeavor. Is that an endeavor you wish to pursue?â€
For Cruz, it is. She’s answered the call. Found a motivating principle to buoy her drive. An insatiable drive forged in the fires of fight-or-flight living. The hunted becomes the hunter.
The only thing is, there’s nothing about what we saw at the top of the episode that indicates “protecting the weak,†mercilessly or otherwise. Back at CIA headquarters, our pumping heart of military industrial espionage, Joe, is having a tough debrief with her bosses, Westfield and Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman). Westfield’s about to get his ass handed to him in another debrief; he’s clearly not one to stop the shit from raining all the way down after it hits the fan. Joe stands by her decision to order the strike and lose her operative, but he’s too pissed to buy it, nor does he accept that the informant was never thoroughly searched for tattoos. Joe blames herself for the mishap, but she doesn’t let that slip until Westfield storms out of the room, and she’s only in the company of Kaitlyn, her immediate superior and “work mom†confidant.
“It’s not your fault, Joe,†says Kaitlyn. “She lied to you.†Kaitlyn wants Joe back in the field to train a new operative for the Lioness Program. But Joe’s just as rattled by the fact that she could have been lied to as she is by the calamity of the situation itself.
Joe’s brief return home, like a lot of Sheridan’s character development, proves a hypnotic mix of clichés and mythic truisms, and it gives Saldana plenty of room to cook. She shows up unannounced, and her husband Neil (Dave Annable) and teenage daughter struggle to assimilate to her presence. An awkward, silent dinner is cut short by listless Joe as she leaves the table and pours herself a drink — the soldier who survives another mission only to be a ghost at home. Saldana has plenty of experience with this high-intensity broken-family material (Guardians of the Galaxy, Avatar, etc.). Again, the beats are blunt and familiar, but she makes the characterization sing with a glance and an assassin’s command of the room.
“If your theater’s the Middle East, I have seven that could work, but this one? Fucking pipe hitter.†Joe’s getting the lowdown on her potential new Lioness, but she’s not sold on Cruz’s laurels. “She’s a fucking door-kicker. The fuck am I gonna do with a door-kicker?†After a demonstration of Cruz’s ass-kicking abilities in “the pit†(some kind of Marine kickboxing ring; again, I don’t know Marine stuff, man, sue me), Joe sizes her up with a rundown of the Lioness Program: “What we do now is locate the wives and the girlfriends and daughters of these high-value targets, and we place an operative close to them. The operative makes friends with them, earns their trust, leads us to the target, and we kill the target.†Cruel? Outside the boundaries of justice? What does Cruz think?
“If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’, ma’am.†It’s the edict Cruz’s original Marine protector passed along — the ultimate strength and the ultimate weakness in fields of combat, both physical and psychological. Joe makes her strip to make sure she doesn’t have any tattoos, revealing cigarette burns on her arms and extension-cord lacerations on her back. “Should answer your question about how much pain I can take,†Cruz says defiantly. “You’ll do,†Joe says with a slight grin of amusement shrouded beneath the imposing brim of her cap. “Get packed.â€
The Lioness team’s new mission starts in Kuwait, where their target, a leader of the Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, will be with his daughter (Cruz’s mark). But first, it’s time to get acquainted with the crew. Awesome, who doesn’t love the gang-intro scene in a “bunch of guys on a mission†story, am I right? A couple of ’em even have classic army-guy nicknames: Two Cups (James Jordan) because he, and I quote, “took two cups of something†on leave in Thailand “and he tried to fuck everything,†and Tex because when he shaves, he looks like Matt Dillon, who starred in the movie Tex … LMAO, like seriously, what are we doing here? Anyway, Cruz finds her place pretty quickly among these hard-drinkin’ hard-talkin’ rabble-rousers, so much so that she even breaks the straight-edge streak she’s been on since the beginning of the show.
Work starts early the next morning, though. With no time to nurse her hangover, straight away Joe thrusts Cruz into this high-intensity game of cat and mouse, eyes on her moving mark — it’s time to make contact.
Up until this point, we’ve heard a lot about how whip-smart Cruz is, and we’ve certainly seen her drive and resilience, but not anything that necessarily screams great spy. But her meet-cute with Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur) is as swift as it is methodical, even if it takes her a beat to remember all the details of her cover. Joe sees Aaliyah exit the jewelry store with Cruz in tow. Trap is set, game’s afoot, and the decisions that move everyone closer to danger have already been made.
The Debrief
• I feel like that was a mistake when Cruz’s boyfriend shattered the glass door as he stormed out of the Marine recruiting office. Is that guy okay?
• That epic pull-up scene during Cruz’s physical fitness test is an absolute gem of unintentional comedy. The drill sergeant, my God: “Look at me. Stand straight. Tuck that ass, we ain’t at the fuckin’ beach!†*dramatic pause* “Attack everything they throw at you just like this, there’s no stopping you.†Incredible.
• Not sure this is the right part for her yet, but I’m stoked to have Nicole in the mix, you know? She’s like my spiritual cool aunt or something; I always feel grounded when she shows up. And Michael Kelly was built in a goddamned lab to play quietly nefarious government operatives, so we got that going for us.
• You get a lot of breaking the show-don’t-tell rule with Sheridan. Sometimes it works; other times, it just feels like overkill. Usually, the actors have conveyed the sentiment already, and then the dialogue comes in to kind of put an exclamation point on it. A prime example is the whole “We’re not here to make friends†argument Joe and Cruz have on the plane to Kuwait. “If your cover is blown, there is no saving you. You have to save yourself,†Joe says. “Then we come get you. You can trust me to do that.†Is this a promise she knows she can’t keep but wants to? Or has she already made up her mind that she’ll never make the same mistake again, no matter the cost?
• As a rule, I’m pretty allergic to Hollywood military propaganda, especially when it comes to the Middle East occupation. Chalk it up to the “too soon†rule. But I also dig a good spy thriller and definitely fuck with a decent “dad show.†I may be a liberal coastal elite or whatever, but I’m also a red-blooded American idiot with the best of ’em. What can I say? I dig Rambo III and Top Gun: Maverick as much as your dad ever did. So consider me your humble lefty millennial burnout dad-whisperer as we make our way through these Special Ops.