'Lioness' Is a Good Gateway Show for Taylor Sheridan-Curious Liberals

Sheridanverse #2

This time, Zoe Saldaña isn’t green or blue. (Lynsey Addario/Paramount+; Hannah Roman)

Taylor Sheridan has a reputation for making reactionary shows, but that’s not totally accurate. There are some conservative elements in the prolific creator’s work, but his shows are all over the place politically. They do not fit a simple conservative/progressive binary. Lioness, for example, depicts a loving, relatively healthy marriage where the husband is the primary caregiver to their children while the wife’s work takes her away from home. And it’s an interracial relationship. You could almost call it woke if not for the fact that her job is killing people for the CIA — which, to be fair, is a nonpartisan activity. The face of American imperialism is a woman of color. What’s more Dem-coded than that? 

Lioness, which just started its second season on Paramount+, is Sheridan’s spy thriller. Zoe Saldaña stars as Joe, the field director of the CIA’s Lioness program. The Lioness program sends female operatives on undercover missions to infiltrate enemy organizations in order to get close enough to assassinate targets. Season 1 followed a Marine named Cruz Manuelos as Joe recruited her into the program, trained her, and sent her to infiltrate a UAE-based terrorist group by befriending the leader’s daughter, whom she fell in love with. Season 2 brings things closer to home, with an Army helicopter pilot named Josephina Carrillo whom Joe recruits to infiltrate a Mexican cartel that’s illegally trafficking oil to China. Doing Lioness is dangerous and psychologically intense work, and the show mixes thrilling (para)military action with character study of the toll this work takes on Joe and her operatives. 

Joe is a classic Dad Show protagonist who is torn between her job and her family. She loves her country and feels a duty to protect it. When her older daughter asks her “Out of all the jobs in the world, why this one?” she answers “So you don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian.” This is the work she was meant to do, and she can’t imagine doing anything else, but she struggles with what the job requires of her. She has to be away from her husband and two daughters doing dangerous things where she might not make it home to them. And she’s sometimes confronted with the inherent evil of breaking down other women’s sense of self in order to send them into situations where they are likely to be killed in order to pursue imperial goals that don’t necessarily make the world safer. “All we did was make the next generation of terrorists,” Cruz tells her in a memorable line at the end of Season 1. Joe is someone whose experience has led her to believe that sometimes you have to do bad things to stop even worse things from happening. She’s no hero, but the people she’s fighting are worse. At least that’s how she justifies it.

Joe is a bad hombre, a member of the most lethal fighting force in the world, a Big Swinging Dick who has to be the most alpha person in the room not just because she has to but also because she wants to. We see the world in a way that’s sympathetic to her point of view even if she’s not always right, which is a thing in every Sheridan show but is treated with more nuance here than it is in the cognitively dissonant Yellowstone, where the characters are terrible people who are portrayed with admiration. Sheridan, who writes every episode, takes a more morally gray approach to the CIA than is common in Hollywood, which has historically been a willing partner in pushing CIA propaganda. But Sheridan is an ideological nonconformist independent who clearly has mixed feelings about the Deep State and its role in propping up American financial interests around the world. He’s a true American, in that his politics are a constellation of disparate ideas mashed together by personal experience. In general, politics as they present in his work do not neatly align with either side. 

Girl Dad, Lioness Mom. (Ryan Green/Paramount+)

For example, for all the machismo in Sheridan’s shows, Joe’s supportive husband Neal (Dave Annable) is portrayed very positively. He’s not a stay-at-home dad — he’s a pediatric oncologist — but he’s home a lot more than his wife. Most of the time we see him in Season 2, he’s in the kitchen making food for his daughters. Joe, meanwhile, tries to cook breakfast and burns everything. She struggles with her relationship to her family the way any Dad Show antihero would, but with the added dimension of traditional expectations of motherhood she is unable to fulfill. She tries to be a good mother even though she’s objectively a pretty bad person. Interestingly, though, unlike the usual Dad Show antihero, she doesn’t really struggle with the “Am I a bad person?” question. She’s suppressed asking that question of herself, because it’s a liability in the field. She takes her job very seriously. And she couldn’t do it without the support of her handsome, charming, salt-and-pepper-haired husband, who, unlike the usual wives in the Dad Show genre, does not complain or disapprove or try to make her stop doing what she does for a living. He’s secure in his role. 

Lioness might be my favorite of Sheridan’s shows. I certainly think it’s the most underrated. It’s sort of like Taylor Sheridan’s equivalent to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, in that it offers a way in for people who might actually enjoy his work but are put off by the bombast and heartland signifiers of the things he’s best known for. Maybe if you like this, you’ll finally be ready to check out Yellowstone, his Born in the U.S.A.