Lioness Review: Taylor Sheridan’s Spy Thriller Runs on Two Women Who Cannot Afford to Be Wrong

Taylor Sheridan built a spy thriller around a program the CIA does not advertise. Lioness, also marketed as Special Ops: Lioness, follows the leader of a CIA team that recruits female operatives — the Lionesses — to work undercover in the war on terror. It premiered on Paramount+ on July 23, 2023, and ran three seasons and 24 episodes, closing on September 13, 2026.

The premise is the hook. Cruz Manuelos, a rough-around-the-edges but passionate young Marine, is pulled into the Lioness Engagement Team to help bring down a terrorist organization from within. Joe, the station chief, trains, manages and leads her female operatives. That is a clean machine for a series: one woman who has to become someone else, one woman who has to answer for what that costs.

Trailer, via Paramount+ Global.

Zoe Saldaña as Joe McNamara

Zoe Saldaña plays Joe McNamara, and she joined the series in February 2022 as star and executive producer, alongside Nicole Kidman. That pairing tells you what Paramount+ thought it had. Saldaña carries the operational spine of Lioness; Kidman, as Kaitlyn Meade, carries the institutional weight above it.

Laysla De Oliveira joined the cast the following month as Cruz Manuelos. The two roles are the series’ engine, and the casting is the reason the engine turns. Joe is the one who has to send a young Marine into a life she cannot describe to anyone outside the program. Cruz is the one who has to live it.

Casting continued in September with Dave Annable, LaMonica Garrett, James Jordan, Austin Hébert, Jonah Wharton and Hannah Love Lanier. In January 2023, Kidman and Michael Kelly joined alongside Morgan Freeman. Annable plays Neal McNamara, Jill Wagner plays Bobby, Garrett plays Tucker, Jordan plays Two Cups, Hébert plays Randy, Wharton plays Tex, and Lanier plays Kate McNamara. Kelly is Byron Westfield.

A writers’ room handover and a promotion

In June 2022, Sheridan took over as showrunner from Thomas Brady after the show’s writers’ room concluded. That is worth naming, because Lioness carries Sheridan’s fingerprints everywhere — the operational detail, the dry talk between people who have done this too long, the sense that the paperwork and the killing are the same job.

When the second season was made official on May 9, 2024, returning cast members included Saldaña, De Oliveira, Kelly and Kidman, with Freeman promoted to a series regular role. De Oliveira marked the renewal on Instagram, saying she was excited to return to the role of Cruz. Thad Luckinbill was promoted to series regular on May 17, 2024. Days later, Genesis Rodriguez joined in an undisclosed capacity.

On September 13, 2024, Max Martini, Kirk Acevedo and Patricia de Leon were cast in recurring roles. Sheridan himself played Cody, the KT tape-wrapped Delta Force operator who assured an iffy Joe. In October 2025, Ian Bohen — a frequent Sheridan collaborator — joined as a Delta Force operator in a series regular role. On January 29, 2026, Elizaveta Neretin joined in a recurring capacity for the third season.

The Lioness run, season by season

Across three seasons and 24 episodes, Lioness never had to explain itself twice. The show knows what it is: a spy thriller about women sent into places where being underestimated is the only weapon that works.

The genre listing — Drama, War & Politics — is accurate and slightly misleading. Lioness is a war story told from the desk and the safe house as much as the field. Joe’s job is management. She trains, she manages, she leads. The tension is not whether Cruz can survive a firefight; it is whether Joe can keep sending her into one.

What the show gets right

The best decision Lioness makes is refusing to treat the Lionesses as a novelty. The program exists because the CIA needs operatives who can move through rooms a male asset cannot. The series takes that as a working premise and then asks what it does to the people inside it. Cruz is not a symbol. She is a Marine with a temper and a mission she did not fully choose.

Saldaña’s Joe is the harder performance, because Joe has to be the person who says yes. She is the station chief, the trainer, the manager. Every episode asks her to justify the program to people above her and to herself. Kidman’s Kaitlyn Meade gives those conversations a ceiling — someone in the building who understands the trade and still signs off.

The supporting cast does the texture work. Bobby, Tucker, Two Cups, Randy and Tex are not decoration; they are the unit that makes the undercover operation legible. The show is at its sharpest when it lets those people talk shop.

Where Lioness sits

Lioness arrived in 2023 into a crowded field of streaming spy dramas and distinguished itself by narrowing its scope. It does not chase geopolitics for their own sake. It stays with Joe and Cruz, and it treats the recruitment of a young Marine as the central moral event of the series.

The third season, renewed in October 2025 and premiered August 2, 2026, extended the run past the point where most shows of this type start repeating themselves. Adding Bohen as a Delta Force operator and Neretin in a recurring role kept the roster moving. Sheridan’s own on-screen turn as Cody is the kind of detail that tells you the showrunner still cares about the small parts.

The weaknesses are structural. A series built on one undercover operation has to keep raising the stakes, and by the back half of the run the institutional maneuvering sometimes crowds out the field work. The show is better when Joe is in a room with Cruz than when she is in a room with a committee.

Still, the record is strong. Three seasons, 24 episodes, a clear premise, and a lead performance that holds the center. Lioness does not pretend the program is clean. It shows you the people who run it and the people who pay for it, and it lets you decide.

TMDB users scored Lioness 8.2 out of 10 across 1,534 votes, and that number holds up against the run. The show’s best asset is its refusal to sentimentalize the work. Joe is not a mentor in a coming-of-age story. She is a manager with a body count she has to live with, and Saldaña plays her without asking for sympathy.

That is why Lioness works. It takes the familiar machinery of the war on terror and runs it through two women who cannot afford to be wrong. The result is a series that is tense, unsentimental and consistently well cast.

Lioness · Paramount+ · Spy Thriller · Taylor Sheridan · TV Review · Zoe Saldana