Stream It Or Skip It?
We found it interesting that the first season of Taylor Sheridan’s series Lioness (fka Special Ops: Lioness) had a cornucopia of fine actors but not enough plot for any of them to grab onto. Even Zoe Saldaña, who is the show’s lead, didn’t seem to get to use enough of the tools she had in her acting repertoire. In the second season, Sheridan looks to fix those issues.
LIONESS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: In the dark of night, a group of well-armed cartel members infiltrate a house. In the dark, they kill the target’s husband and son and kidnap the target, a congresswoman named Hernandez (Czarina Mireles).
The Gist: Back in the DC area, Joe (Zoe Saldaña), head of the CIA’s Lioness team is at home trying to make breakfast for her husband Neal (Dave Annable) and their two children. After she burns most of it, the clan goes to a waffle restaurant, where Joe sees news on the TV about the abduction. She knows that the Lioness Quick Response Force (QRF) will end up being deployed for this.
In the White House situation room, Joe joins a briefing for Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman) which includes her boss, Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) and CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly). The upshot: The Mexican government is being heavily leveraged by a foreign partner, likely China, trying to draw fire from the US on Mexican soil, a huge no-no. Joe is being given only a few weeks to find and cultivate an informant to be a Lioness and infiltrate the government to find the source of this operation. But first, the QRF needs to exfiltrate the congresswoman.
Joe has to leave immediately, and it’s getting tougher to leave her family on these operations, especially ones that are extremely risky like this one. When she gets to Texas, she meets her crew: Kyle (Thad Luckinbill), a fellow CIA officer with whom she’s butted heads; Tracer (Max Martini), whom she hasn’t worked with; and Cody (Matt Gerald), whom she hasn’t worked with in awhile. When Joe asks if Cody is “a little long in the tooth,” he replies sagely: “You know what they say, Joe: Beware the old soldier. He’s old for a reason.”
The congresswoman was smart enough to turn on tracking, so the group knows where she is and when she’s on the move. It’s certainly a seat-of-the-pants operation, including the group ramming the car with the congresswoman inside and a vault off a high riverbank.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We still maintain that Lioness is reminiscent of Homeland.
Our Take: Taylor Sheridan wrote and directed the second season opener of his series, and he’s taking it in a bit of a different direction than what we saw in the first season. The operation that Joe and her QRF team will be a part of isn’t overseas; it’s very close to home. But it also seems that Sheridan will be showing more of the characters that Freeman, Kidman and Kelly play, and how the behind-the-scenes planning influences just what Joe and her team can and can’t do.
But the biggest change seems to be Joe’s increasing ambivalence about her job, given the sacrifices she’s making with her family. We see more than one scene with Neal making excuses for Joe’s absence to their daughters. It looks like her older daughter, Kate (Hannah Love Lanier) is going to start figuring things out, adding a complication for Joe. Once Kate starts questioning what her mother does, Joe may want more than ever to have a quieter existence back in DC.
It certainly makes for a deeper story than the more operational-focused first season, which is something we welcome in this series. A paint-by-numbers anti-terrorism plot is something we’ve seen a few dozen times by now, and when you have actors like Saldaña that are capable of so much more than that, Sheridan needed to make time for both personal plotlines and shoot-’em-ups.
We also didn’t quite understand why Sheridan had two Oscar winners in the cast — Freeman and Kidman — and only used them sparingly in the first season. Yes, contracts and schedules being what they are, he might not have had any choice. Either way, we’re glad that we’re going to see more of them — and Kelly — in Season 2, if only because all three of them are effective at playing aggressive government officials, and they all bring some gravitas to the government part of this equation.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After the exfiltration operation ended, knowing what’s ahead with training and deploying another Lioness, Joe girds herself for what’s next.
Sleeper Star: We like that Hannah Love Lanier’s Kate is going to get a larger role. And we haven’t seen most of the QRF force that we saw last season yet, but we’ll see more of them starting in Episode 2.
Most Pilot-y Line: Neal monologuing to his daughters on why lights don’t count as decorations seemed like a bit of an indulgence for Sheridan.
Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s still plenty of shooting and other action in the second season of Lioness, but at least now Sheridan understands that his stellar cast can do a whole lot more than grimace and hold a gun.
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.
