Special Ops: Lioness: Grade the Premiere of Taylor Sheridan’s New Paramount+ Drama
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The prolific Taylor Sheridan took you far from Yellowstone this Sunday with the double-episode premiere of Special Ops: Lioness, a Paramount+ espionage drama. (This recap only covers the first episode.) Will you stay tuned for the adventures of Joe and Cruz?
Lioness stars Zoe Saldaña as “Joe,” the CIA station chief of the titular special ops team (“inspired by an actual U.S. Military program”) that specializes in placing female undercover assets in the lives of the wives, girlfriends and female family members of HVTs (high-value targets).
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The series premiere, penned by Sheridan himself, opens with Joe and her team of operatives staked out near a compound in Syria when Joe gets a call from her current asset, whose cover has been blown (due to an overlooked tattoo of a cross). And just as Joe and her team begin to take action, she hears the asset get captured over the phone. Joe in turn orders a drone strike, to save her asset from God knows what and also take out some Taliban along the way.
In the wake of making that iffy call, Joe is debriefed by two superiors (played by Jack Ryan‘s Michael Kelly and Far and Away‘s Nicole Kidman). She also is seen returning home — to a husband (Brothers and Sisters‘ Dave Annable) and two kids — unannounced, which brings to light the usual tensions surrounding an oft-traveling parent/partner.
Elsewhere (in what must have been a slight “jump back in time,” I took it?), we meet Cruz Manuelos, a stripper-turned-fast food worker whose undesirable life is populated by an abusive beau. Cruz, though, can give about as good as she gets, and one morning after receiving her latest beating, she makes a break for it. Her fella (on whom she just whaled with a frying pan) gives chase, and Cruz finds salvation after literally stumbling into a Marine recruitment center. When it becomes clear that her abuser will not let up, Cruz slips off to a women’s shelter for the night, and then enlists in the Marines, where she instantly proves to be an elite recruit — both because of her tenacity and her physical strength.
As such, Cruz lands on Joe’s radar as a potential new asset, though the formidable females’ first interaction is a bit prickly — partly because Joe this time must request a demeaning strip search (for tattoos), but also because of Cruz’s overabundance of confidence. Nonetheless, Cruz gets picked to join the Lioness team, she meets the operators, and they make tracks for Kuwait City. There, Cruz wayyyyyyyyy-too-easily and wayyyyyyyyy-too-quickly wriggles her way into the life of an HVT’s wife who is out shopping, after which onlooker Joe reports to the team, “We’re in.”
And that is the close of Episode 1.
What did you think of Special Ops: Lioness?
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