JuicyTalk
Special Ops: Lioness season 3 will be here soon, but there’s still time to catch up on Taylor Sheridan’s excellent spy thriller. The universe of Taylor Sheridan TV shows goes on and on. This is a showrunner whose prolific career is rising to the level of Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, and even Dick Wolf.
His 2023 series, Special Ops: Lioness, has taken his traditional Western storytelling style to modern warfare, and after a shaky first season, the series has found its footing. Lioness season 3 will likely release in late 2026, which should give newcomers plenty of time to catch up on the 16 episodes of the show.
Special Ops: Lioness Is A Spy Thriller From Taylor Sheridan
Special Ops: Lioness is a spy thriller that stars Zoe Saldaña as Joe McNamara, a CIA senior case officer who is in charge of a program known as “Lioness”. The Lioness program is a clandestine operation consisting of female soldiers and agents who infiltrate enemy circles by becoming close with the women around them.
In season 1, Joe and her supervisor, Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), gather together a new group of Lionesses, a few years after a mission went awry and an operative died. Season 2 finds Joe and the Lionesses going after the Cartels in Mexico. The series jumped from 54% to 90% on Rotten Tomatoes between the two seasons.
Special Ops: Lioness is powered by an ensemble cast of talented actresses, with Saldaña in particular giving an exciting and nuanced performance. You believe her as a dangerous soldier, but she makes the family drama aspects of the series just as compelling. It’s a moody, textured, and unusual series with more surprises than you might guess.
How Special Ops: Lioness Is Different From Taylor Sheridan’s Other TV Shows
Special Ops: Lioness feels very different from the many other TV shows in the expanded Taylor Sheridan universe of series. Obviously, it’s not a Western, at least not a typical one, though there is definitely some connective tissue between the genre and the show. Lioness is a spy thriller first and foremost.
Lioness is also the only Taylor Sheridan show with a woman-led cast. His shows skew male heavily, and while they each have some well-written female characters, there aren’t a lot of them. Lioness is filled almost entirely with women, and it gives the series a much different feel than something like Mayor of Kingstown.
The mood and cinematography for Special Ops: Lioness is also different from Sheridan’s other TV shows. The action thriller genre actually seems to suit Sheridan better than the Western, and his dynamic camera angles and tense story moments work extremely well within this modern warfare series.
- Release Date
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July 23, 2023
- Network
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Paramount+
- Showrunner
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Taylor Sheridan
- Directors
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John Hillcoat, Anthony Byrne, Paul Cameron, Stephen Kay, Taylor Sheridan
- Writers
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Taylor Sheridan, Jill Wagner
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Laysla De Oliveira
Cruz Manuelos
