I Get My First Look at Taylor Sheridan In Lioness. I Think You Should Too

 

 

I realize that my lack of devotion to streaming over the last decade has led to be miss some of the biggest cultural phenomena in recent years. But I never expected that behavior to make me miss the entirety of the one most famous showrunners during this period. Yet because I have never subscribed to Paramount Plus, I have basically spent the last several years ignoring the work of Taylor Sheridan..

It's not like I didn’t know who Sheridan was before this. As a screenwriter he had written two of the most memorable films of the 2010s, the thriller Sicario which has become its own franchise and the masterful neo-western Hell or High Water which deservedly received a Best Screenplay nomination in 2016. But apparently he found his niche – and did he ever- when he started working with Paramount Plus and has in just five years managed to most successful collaboration of showrunner and network in the 21^st century, ranking with David Simon’s collaboration with HBO, Ryan Murphy’s with FX and Vince Gilligan’s with AMC.

Starting with the cultural phenomena that is Yellowstone, Sheridan has dominated both the western and crime drama format for the past five years, both with prequels to the Yellowstone franchise, crime thrillers such as Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown. He also had the remarkable gift of getting some of the most unexpected box office stars to work for him, from Kevin Costner to Sylvester Stallone to Jeremy Renner. When he got Harrison Ford to make his first appearance on series TV in 1923, it was a get that no other showrunner had managed to accomplish. And in that sense my decision to not get Paramount Plus and watch his show may have led to be absent to some of the most popular television around.

But that has begun to change recently. When Paramount officially merged with Showtime back in 2023, many of Paramount Plus’s programs began to air on Showtime over the last year. This has also included the most recent seasons of many Paramount Plus shows, including the final season of Star Trek: Discovery and the recent season of Halo. And this has applied to Sheridan’s series as well: Mayor of Kingstown has begun to air its third season just this past summer.

I felt, given the fact that Sheridan is such a force that I needed to at least watch one of his series and this week, the powers that be with Showtime gave me just an opportunity. Lioness, a Paramount Plus drama that debuted last year, has begun airing its first season, two episodes a week each Sunday. With time to kill I decided to watch the first two episodes last night. And my impression was extremely favorable.

Lioness is something of an outlier in Sheridan’s work so far: whereas his dramas have either involved the west, either in the past or the present, or various on organized crime Lioness deals with the CIA and the War on Terror. The other aberration is that while every series Sheridan has done has male leads in almost every major part, Lioness is dominated more by women then any previous series. To be sure, most of the women in Sheridan’s work are so tough that they could make Claire Underwood wither with a stare but they’ve rarely been put front and center in a way we’ve seen.

At the center of Lioness is Joe, played by Zoe Saldana. Saldana has of course been part of the blockbuster scene for most of her life: from her work in Avatar to her revelation as Uhura in the reimaging of Star Trek. That still doesn’t prepare you for her work as Joe, the head of an operation known as Lioness. Its job has evolved from placing female operatives near Muslim terrorists based on the idea that it would be more difficult for them to be strip searched to getting them close to the daughters and wives of those same terrorists in order for them to be executed. This can lead to things going horribly wrong as we are made clear in the opening teaser for the series when her most recent recruit is burned because they spotted the tattoo on her. She orders her strike team to move in but when she hears her being executed she makes the command decision to have a drone strike called in. When she is debriefed by her superior (Michael Kelly) he is infuriated at shoddy work. Joe is upset because she made the mistake of getting close to her.

Joe is drawn from the same framework as Carrie Matheson when it comes to the kind of ruthless CIA operatives but unlike Carrie, she actually has a fairly happy marriage to a pediatric surgeon. I didn’t expect to see Dave Annable who has been one of the favorite actors since I first met him on Brothers & Sisters nearly fifteen years ago.  He has aged remarkably well since the youngest Walker sibling to someone who has his own edges. In the second episode, he has to tell the parents of a six year old girl that their daughter has a brain tumor so massive that the only way to reduce it is to remove her eye and even then she won’t live more than a year. He subsequently is beaten up when the daughter’s family takes it out on him. Immediately afterwards, he’s called by his daughter’s school where we’ve seen Kate beat an opposing athlete. When he attempts to discipline her, she immediately demands to talk to her mother because she’s African American and Neal is white. Joe, it’s worth noting, has the kind of life where she’s obviously an absentee parent and its clear Charlie is taking it out on her and her father.  The marriage seems to be working (we see Jo and Neal having fairly vigorous sex which she makes it her call to finish before she takes a call from work) but we know that Jo is the kind of person who has detached herself from reality in such a way that she thinks her job means everything.

If there was a flaw in Homeland as there is so many other series with female antiheroes at the center, it was that it never had a female character who was at the level of Claire Danes. Lioness breaks that format at the start in two different ways. The first is with the newest recruit Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira). As we see in the first episode four years ago she managed to escape a horrific home life which involved domestic abuse and ended up a member of the marines. She has immense physical capabilities and endurance that goes beyond what most men in her profession are capable of. In four years she’s become one of the most qualified and toughest marines imaginable. It’s clear the moment Jo recruits Cruz has been through more then most Marines are in a lifetime. None of this impresses Joe, who thinks she’s doorbuster and has no intention of telling her anything more than she needs to be told, either about what she’s doing or her target.

Saldana gives an impression that she is devoted to her job above all and that she’s devoted to stopping these extremist. But she also gives the impression that there’s something from her that’s been completely eroded. Part of it maybe that she has seen too many of her recruits killed over the years and that there’s a detachment to it. But it’s also clear watching her that may be a message Sheridan is sending about the idea of going to the dark side. If you don’t see the people you send out to die as human beings, then what does it say about the way you view anybody on earth? What does it matter if we basically consider the people who give their lives for America little more than sacks of meat?

This is made very clear in the second episode when Joe tells her superior “she wants to put Cruz through the ringer.’ To her, this means taking her off the street, having her abducted, waterboarded, put through psy ops, electrocuting her and beating her, all for the purpose of seeing when she’ll break. She claims both to Cruz and everyone around her that this is being done in order to know, if and when she’s captured, how long that they will have to rescue her. But the way she says ‘everyone breaks’ makes it very clear that for her this is all theoretical and that eventually what we see in the teaser happens more often then it doesn’t.

To Joe the ends totally justify the means. When the people who abduct her see how badly its going, their leader tells them its done and Jo tells them know. When he points out he might end up before a review board, she says that irrelevant. It’s clear to Jo that what Congress or her agency heads think really doesn’t matter as long as she gets results. The fact that we’ve been doing some version of this for more than twenty years makes it very clear that her definition of ‘results’ are not the same thing as actually changing things.

It's clear watching this that the people who by far have the clearest view on this are her team, most of whom we’ve met in the first two episodes. The soldiers clearly have a more realistic view of how this works than Joe does. It’s clear that they offer a human side that Jo has basically given up on. After Cruz goes through everything and is returned to an Army base, they see what has happened and their first reaction is ‘to take her out to a barfight.” They then go to see the soldiers who put her through the exercise and get into a brawl with them that ends in serious injury. In the midst of this, of course, the target they’re following calls Cruz and wants to set up a meeting. As they all run out of the bar, the military mocks everything that has happened saying: “This is the CIA, all right!” There’s an excellent chance Joe’s decision to see whether or not Cruz breaks may have killed this operation in its tracks. But its unlikely Joe will take responsibility and shrug it off even if things go wrong.

I didn’t expect for Lioness to resonate with me as much as it did.  Maybe I’ve been waiting for a series to fill that Homeland shaped hole in my heart for the last four years and Lioness seems more than able to deliver on that front. Aside from the moral issues it raises and the brilliance of the writing, it has one of the best casts assembled. I haven’t even mentioned Nicole Kidman (when does she have the time to fit this in?) as Kaitlyn Meade, Joe’s boss and quite possibly the only ally she has at work. Kidman’s role is truly supporting but there’s a mix of compassion in it that many of the protagonists are missing. She knows when her protégé is deflecting, but she also knows better than to probe. Other superb character actors including Kelly and Martin Donovan have major roles and I’m told Morgan Freeman will show up at some point.

Lioness has been renewed for a second season which I’m told will air sometime later this year and will no doubt air on Showtime at some point. I’m already more than willing to climb onboard regardless of how the first season ends up playing out. It hits all the right notes for what I have come to relish from the best television shows and reflects the moral ambiguity that at their best series like Homeland and 24 could do at their peaks. I can only hope that this trend continues with the rest of Sheridan’s works being broadcast on Showtime as well. Tulsa King sounded interesting and I’d like to see that too.

My score: 4.25 stars.