The second season of Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ series Lioness improved on the first, mainly because Sheridan took a deep dive into the character played by Zoe Saldaña, as well as giving the show’s other award-winning stars more to do than just squint at screens. The third season, though, starts with a massive battle sequence, which made us scratch our heads.
LIONESS SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A shot of Washington, DC. Then we cut to Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña), a CIA officer in charge of the Lioness team, working out while news reports from various world trouble spots play.
The Gist: Joe, who is deployed all over the world with her team to train and deploy female assets to infiltrate various groups and government agencies, has had a long stretch at home with her husband Neal (Dave Annable) and daughters Kate (Hannah Love Lanier) and Charlie (Celestina Harris). She’s on the phone with her boss, Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) about a possible mission when her car is deliberately t-boned and she’s taken hostage.
Six months earlier, Kaitlyn’s boss Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) joins Kaitlyn to oversee a meeting between Joe and a Ukrainian operative with information about the location of a high-ranking Russian operative in the secretive SSD. The Ukrainians want the Americans to take him because it won’t draw Vladimir Putin’s wrath as much as the Ukrainians taking him would. The spy is essentially a bargaining chip. The operative turns out to be Joe’s counterpart in Ukraine, which will help later on if they can get this Russian spy.
Joe’s team is deployed to Ukraine — Bobby (Jill Wagner), Tucker (LaMonica Garrett), Two Cups (James Jordan), Randy (Austin Hébert), and Tex (Jonah Wharton). They’re going to be dealing with familiar faces during the operation, including former Lioness recruit Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), who is now in Delta Force with Cody Spears (Taylor Sheridan). The site is heavily fortified by North Korean soldiers and Russian drone swarms.
Amber Whalen (Dawn Olivieri) is the CIA officer in charge of the operation, but Cody is the tactical planner, and his plan is super-aggressive, incorporating their own drone swarms, lots of explosives, and dogs trained to literally go for the jugular. Joe and Cruz are going with Cody’s team to ID the spy, while the rest of the team is left to protect the exfiltration effort, a prospect the team hates, but their rivals on the Delta Force are in charge.
The operation is stressful and costly, but successful. But when Joe gets back home, there’s a threat waiting outside her door that she never anticipated.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? For the third season in a row, we maintain that Lioness, created and written by Sheridan, reminds us of Homeland.
Our Take: The first episode of Lioness‘s third season strays from the show’s norm in that Joe and her crew haven’t found and trained a new Lioness to infiltrate an organization — at least not yet. The first episode seemed to be a showcase for Sheridan’s ability to write a complex, multifaceted tactical battle and pull it off on screen, given that about half the episode consists of Cody leading Joe and his team through this gauntlet, with shooting, explosions and dogs ripping out veins subbing for actual story.
We’re not sure how successful it was, and to what end it served. Sheridan crams the planning scene full of acronyms, and between that and his, um, low-key performance as Cody, we had to rewind after the battle scene and go back to listen to his briefing all over again. As Joe says, though, it seems like an awfully risky operation just so someone from the CIA can identify this Russian operative. He’s no more than a bargaining chip at this point, and Joe is visibly angry at the risks they had to take to find him.
The whole idea of the show, which was emphasized in Season 2, was that Joe is increasingly finding it difficult to do her job. The main reason is that these operations take her away from her family, something she’s been prioritizing more, and it’s been damaging to her marriage to Neal. But a secondary reason is that the missions are making less sense in the grand scheme of things, and the risky Ukrainian deployment points that out to her.
This is what we hope continues in Season 3, as it not only is a more compelling thing to watch than extended battle scenes, but is also plays to Saldaña’s strengths. She’s loyal to her country, to the CIA, and to her team, but the conflict within her about her job continues to grow. Saldaña plays that conflict well, and it’ll be interesting to see what chaotic events lead up to the abduction we see in the episode’s cold open.
The rest of the cast, especially Kidman, Kelly, and Morgan Freeman as Secretary of State Edwin Mullins, are always going to be fun to have around, but their roles carry more of a vibe of “government officials giving orders” than anything else. Sure, Sheridan gives Kidman’s character Kaitlyn some internal conflict, especially related to her working relationship with Joe, but the more engrossing story has to do with Joe.
Performance Worth Watching: Despite the presence of Kidman, Kelly, and Freeman, this is Saldaña’s show, and she continues to play Joe with a combination of external intensity and internal conflict.
Sex And Skin: We see Joe’s bare butt in the shower, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: After two men posing as police detectives come to her house, Joe calls the incident in, saying “I’m blown.”
Sleeper Star: We know Michael Kelly has played many other types of roles in his career, but he just carries himself like a high-powered government official, doesn’t he?
Most Pilot-y Line: Just because this is his show doesn’t mean that Sheridan is allowed to mumble and mutter through his lines.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re on board for Joe’s inner conflict reaching new levels in Season 3 of Lioness. We just wish that Taylor Sheridan wouldn’t waste so much time with bloody shoot ’em ups and leave time for more character exploration.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.