Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ On Paramount+, Where Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman Star In Taylor Sheridan’s Anti-Terrorism Series

Taylor Sheridan hasn’t cornered the market on Paramount+ series chock full of A-list stars, but it certainly feels like it. His latest series, Special Ops: Lioness, is his fifth P+ series — and sixth overall, if you include Yellowstone, the show that started his empire, and its crammed with big-time names. But at its heart, the show’s a military spy show that’s not much different than many of the shows in this vein we’ve seen over the past 15 years.

SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A view of a village in the desert. “KOBANE, SYRIA.”

The Gist: A woman in a burqa goes into an underground bunker in a building and hides. She takes out a phone and makes a call.

In the meantime, a team of military-trained CIA agents watches for a possible attack. The group’s leader, Joe (Zoe Saldaña) gets a call from her embedded asset, the one hiding in the burqa, just as their position comes under siege. Her cover has been blown, the asset says; someone saw the cross tattoo on her side as she was bathing. Joe calls in for air cover for their position while trying to make sure her asset stays safe.

Ultimately, though, the asset gets captured while on the phone with Joe, leaving her only one choice: She has the terrorist compound blown up with the asset inside.

When she returns to Langley, she’s questioned by the Lioness program’s bosses, Donald Westfield (Michael Kelly) and Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), and while she said she trusted her asset, she acknowledges that she’ll need to be more careful with the next one. In the meantime, she comes home and is a virtual stranger to her husband Neil (Dave Annable) and their two kids.

We go back four years and see how Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) came to be a Marine; working in a burger joint, she’s being chased by her abusive boyfriend when she fights back, and runs into a Marine recruitment office. She eventually enlists, and she scores through the roof, both in physical and intelligence tests.

Joe is skeptical when Cruz is offered as her new asset, but seems to appreciate her toughness. The Lioness program is designed to have assets infiltrate terrorist organizations via the wives and female family members of the organization’s members, and Cruz’s assignment is to befriend the sister of their desired target. After she meets the team — Bobby (Jill Wagner), Tucker (LaMonica Garrett), Two Cups (James Jordan), Tex (Jonah Wharton), and Randy (Austin Hébert) — and reluctantly drinks with them, a hungover Cruz is inserted into her undercover assignment without much prep, which is exactly the way Joe wants it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Whenever there’s a show that involves CIA assets having to neutralize Muslim terrorists, we compare it to Homeland, so there you go.

Our Take: Special Ops: Lioness is a Taylor Sheridan show through and through. The Paramount+ uber-producer created the series and wrote the first episode, basing the story on a real-life counterterrorism program. He then did what he usually does, which is cram the show full of A-list stars, with a compelling lead in Saldaña and Oscar-winning support in the form of Kidman and, later in the season, Morgan Freeman. But in this case, the result is less than the sum of its parts.

There’s nothing in the first episode that indicates that Special Ops: Lioness is anything other than a standard-grade spy drama where ‘Murican heroes fight Muslim bad guys. It’s a formula we’ve seen a million times to the point of exhaustion. The first episode had so much ground to cover, from introducing us to Joe and the team, to telling us Cruz’ backstory to putting the two women in position to end up working together, that we only get tiny glimpses into their characters that don’t tell us enough about where this story might go.

Joe is devastated that she had to kill her asset, but as she tells Westfield, by the time she was captured, she was “dead already.” Her job has basically made her a stranger to her family, to the point where she has to be reintroduced to her kids and she and her husband have an open relationship. Other than that, though, Joe is just portrayed as a hard-charging operative who doesn’t want to get to know anyone on her team.

What we know about Cruz, on the other hand, is that she’s a smart, strong woman who made a lot of bad choices in life until she ran into that recruiting office. She stopped drinking because of these bad choices, but slips off the wagon because, as one of her new team says, “I can’t trust someone I can’t drink with.” So we do get a bit more background on Cruz, but how that helps her in her new position, we don’t know.

The rest of the team right now is just a jumble of TV paramilitary cliches, and we find it hard to believe that Kelly and Kidman are on board solely to be officious bosses in isolated scenes in each episode. Given what we know of Sheridan’s output over the last few years, this show has the potential to grow, but what we see so far is pretty light on story as well as character.

Sex and Skin: We briefly see Joe’s nude front after she gets out of the shower, and then there’s the scene where Joe makes Cruz strip naked to check her for tattoos.

Parting Shot: Observing that Cruz has befriended their target, Joe, dressed in a hijab and sunglasses, calls the team and says, “she’s in.”

Sleeper Star: Jill Wagner is playing a pretty different role than anything we’ve seen her play to this point. It’s certainly a long way from when she was best known as the spokesperson for Mercury vehicles.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the Marine officer tells Cruz that her assignment will take her away from the life and family she knows, she responds with, “I have no family.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. Special Ops: Lioness isn’t a mess, but it’s strangely inessential and inert, given its cast and Sheridan’s involvement. There are better, similar shows out there.

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.