by Tim Gordon
In Taylor Sheridan’s expanding television universe, strength takes many forms. Sometimes it is a cowboy’s defiance or a power broker’s control. In Lioness, it belongs to women operating in the shadows, carrying the emotional weight of wars that never make the headlines.
Inspired by real-life military programs, Lioness follows Joe, played by Zoe Saldana, a seasoned CIA operative who leads an elite undercover unit of women trained to infiltrate terrorist networks. Her mission demands both precision and deception, requiring her agents to weaponize empathy as much as combat skill. Sheridan uses this premise to explore the unrelenting pressures placed on women who must outthink and outperform their male counterparts while suppressing every trace of doubt or vulnerability.
Saldana’s Joe is one of Sheridan’s most layered protagonists. She is a soldier, a mother, and a leader who knows that every victory has a cost. Her discipline is unwavering, but beneath it lies exhaustion and guilt. Saldana captures that contradiction with remarkable restraint, revealing a woman who must bury her emotions to do her job, even as those same emotions drive her to protect her team. Sheridan gives her room to be human without apology, grounding her toughness in something more than training: empathy.
Laysla De Oliveira’s Cruz provides the emotional core of the series. Recruited from the Marines and drawn into the Lioness program, Cruz represents innocence colliding with the brutal demands of espionage. Her journey is one of transformation, but not the triumphant kind. Sheridan shows the cost of what happens when idealism meets the reality of covert warfare. Through Cruz, we see how loyalty becomes both a strength and a trap. She is the heart of the story, even as her heart is slowly being tested to the breaking point.
Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman lend authority and restraint as figures who embody the institutional machinery behind Joe’s missions. Their presence reminds us that the real power often lies in rooms far removed from the battlefield. Sheridan uses their characters to frame the uneasy relationship between duty and morality, exposing how easily people become assets in systems built to sacrifice them for a cause.
Visually, Lioness is Sheridan’s most expansive canvas yet. From CIA control rooms to desolate deserts and lavish international estates, the series operates at a global scale without losing its human focus. Each location reflects a different kind of isolation, and every mission is a negotiation between ethics and necessity. Sheridan’s direction keeps the tension taut, often choosing close-ups over spectacle. What matters most are the faces—the moments when these women must decide whether survival means betraying their conscience.
Where Yellowstone and Landman explore the frontier of land and industry, Lioness marks Sheridan’s frontier of identity and endurance. It expands his recurring themes of power, loyalty, and consequence into a space rarely occupied by women in television of this scale. Joe and Cruz are not idealized warriors. They are professionals, mothers, and daughters navigating a world that consumes them. Sheridan does not glorify their sacrifice; he illuminates it.
At its heart, Lioness is a story about service and the unseen cost of protection. Sheridan examines how systems built to defend freedom often erode the personal freedoms of those tasked with maintaining them. Joe’s conflict is not just external. It is internal, between who she is and what she must do to survive. The same tension fuels Cruz, who must decide what kind of soldier she wants to be when every path forward demands compromise.
The series also asks deeper questions about what it means to lead. Joe’s leadership is not built on authority, but trust. She commands through compassion and precision, holding her team together with an iron will that is as much maternal as it is tactical. Saldana plays her not as an archetype, but as a human being trying to balance purpose with pain.
Lioness (Special Ops: Lioness) expands Sheridan’s universe beyond the American frontier into the global corridors of power. Yet his storytelling instincts remain the same. He still searches for humanity in systems designed to suppress it, for connection in worlds built on control. These women may wear different uniforms, but their struggle echoes those of every Sheridan creation: the fight to keep one’s soul intact in a world that demands its surrender.
In Lioness, strength is not measured by victories won, but by the courage to endure. Sheridan’s women do not seek glory. They seek meaning. And in that pursuit, they redefine what power truly looks like.
