Lioness

Our Review

Taylor Sheridan’s CIA paramilitary drama: Zoe Saldaña’s Joe — a Marine-turned-station-chief running the Lioness program (female operatives embedded with terrorist-financier families) — juggles missions in Iraq and Syria with a home life her job is quietly destroying. The premise gives Sheridan his two favorite things: geopolitical procedural grit and family-wrecking cost-of-service drama, and the show runs hot on both.

Saldaña is ferocious in the field and exhausted at home — the show’s real subject is what the work takes from the women who do it. Laysla De Oliveira’s Cruz (season 1’s lioness, undercover with a terrorist’s wife), Morgan Freeman, and Nicole Kidman as the program’s political architects give it scope, and season 2’s cartel war is Sheridan’s meanest plotting since early Yellowstone. The action is tactical and grounded; the moral weight is never shrugged off.

Verdict: Watch it for the best female-led action on TV. Sheridan’s most disciplined show.