Entertainment
Taylor Sheridan Returns to His ‘Sicario’ Roots in a Messy and Chaotic ‘Lioness’ Season 3
It’s been three years since Lioness premiered on Paramount+, but in that time, it has slowly transformed from a show about female spies sent to infiltrate terrorist regimes to an international spy thriller full of conspiracies and modern warfare. Season 3 of Taylor Sheridan‘s Lioness turns its focus not to a new lioness, as in the previous two seasons, but towards the Russo-Ukrainian war; rather than using a scalpel to extract intel, the team behind the lionesses now feels more like a sledgehammer. While Season 3 offers a fictional window into the bloody war and spycraft at work today, stepping away from the original concept and transforming the series into just another spy thriller is a disappointment for one of Sheridan’s most ambitious shows.
Taylor Sheridan Pulls From a Familiar Bag of Tricks for ‘Lioness’ Season 3
It was clear toward the end of Season 2 that Lioness intended to abandon its initial formula. Although the series introduced Genesis Rodriguez as Josie, the daughter of a high-ranking cartel member, Lioness was already looking beyond the U.S. borders when it comes to the narrative. This meant that Josie’s story often felt like it was taking a backseat to the larger machinations of a multi-season arc. In Season 3, the show completely dispenses with its original concept, introducing no new lioness and instead looking inward at Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and growing threats from Russia and China. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that the show is bad (Sheridan is good at keeping the rhythm of a thriller going), it does make for a blander story. What was once a unique action series has now become just any old spy show.
Season 3 is, by far, the bloodiest we’ve seen to date, but Sheridan also likes to glorify the military even when he’s trying to be realistic about it. In one action-packed sequence, we see Joe alongside Sheridan’s character, Cody, and the Delta Force K9 handler, Grady (Ian Bohen), on a mission together in Ukraine. The action sequence is brutal and violent as the team executes countless soldiers who stand in their way, first watching them get torn apart by dogs and then shot. Joe and Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) are rightfully traumatized by the carnage, but the show paints the actions as necessary evils. They might look cool doing it; it might feel like a heroic sacrifice for the safety of our nation, but Sheridan doesn’t do enough to condemn just how ruthless warfare has become.
Unsurprisingly, Sheridan once again seems to enjoy putting women in compromising positions, as there are multiple scenes where a female character is either fully naked or exposing herself for seemingly no reason at all. One particularly difficult scene to watch involves a woman being stripped naked and probed all over in search of a tracker. It’s a violating scene, one that is meant to show just how strong the character is for overcoming it, but it feels gratuitous. It’s odd in general just how many times female nudity occurs in the show, whether it’s two women in an intimate relationship or one baring her breasts unnecessarily in a moment of enraged passion. At no point do men do the same; in fact, nudity seems to be something exclusively reserved for female characters. Not only do the male characters lack development, but they simply stand as macho archetypes who seem completely infallible. In the past, that was fine, because our focus was always on the lioness of the season, but in Lioness Season 3, women are there to be admired physically while also being badasses, and men are just allowed to be badasses.
‘Lioness’ Season 3’s Two Timelines Are Confusing and Messy
The key problem with Season 3, however, is not the romanticization of soldiers or the way Sheridan writes women; it’s the simple fact that it’s narratively a mess. Two timelines are running parallel to each other, which offer plenty of suspense about what exactly happened in the past leading to a major twist in the future. The issue is that the two timelines face the same problem, and the show can quickly get confusing as it jumps back and forth and offers no visual indicator when we’re in the past beyond a slide that indicates a scene is happening six months prior. Tracking events in the show becomes difficult when you try to go beyond the broad strokes.
On top of that, Season 3’s scripts are bursting at the seams with jargon that the viewer is either meant to know already or blindly accept. While it’s more realistic that these characters wouldn’t need to explain acronyms like SVR, SBU, and SSD, the average viewer needs that information. This means that Lioness is a show you definitely need to give your full attention to, but even then, you might have to rewatch episodes to actually get a full picture of what is going on.
Things get especially complicated when operatives from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russian sleeper agents, and every other clandestine agency are tossed into the mix. Unlike previous seasons, which had a clear objective, Lioness Season 3 mostly feels chaotic. The team is constantly on the back foot, which ups the thrill factor but makes the story feel disorganized. Although the concept is interesting, the execution renders the season a total mess.
‘Lioness’ Season 3 Takes Taylor Sheridan Back to His Action Roots
Despite these faults, that doesn’t mean Lioness Season 3 is all bad. In fact, it has some of the most thrilling and heart-pounding sequences of the entire series. The action scenes feel distinctly reminiscent of Sicario, Sheridan’s debut script, and the relentless tempo of those moments ratchets up the tension and keeps you invested. Specifically, Sheridan’s look at warfare in Ukraine feels distinctly different than the previous seasons’ dealings with the Middle East or Mexico. From the trenches and barbed wire to the drones and robots with guns, it’s terrifying and a completely new type of combat we haven’t seen before.
Saldaña is as good as ever, balancing Joe’s cutthroat instincts alongside her struggle as a wife and mother of a family that has given her endless chances. It is surprising to consistently see how far her husband Neal (Dave Annable) can be pushed, but the show seems hellbent on convincing us that he’s willing to overlook anything and everything to stay with her. But while Saldaña is consistently good in Lioness, the standout of Season 3 is Michael Kelly as Byron Westfield, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations. When he’s paired with someone like Nicole Kidman as Kaitlyn, their scenes instantly come to life, but on his own, when Byron comes face to face with the enemy, his scenes are sharp, clever, and simply entertaining to watch.
While the cast is still the same and the team that Joe works with is still around, Lioness Season 3 is wading into new waters, and there are definitely growing pains. There are still infodump scenes with characters like Martin Donovan‘s Errol Meade, who is always brought in to give the audience some kind of lecture on the state of the world. But rather than relegating scenes like that to the beginning and end of a season, it feels like every conversation is wielded for exposition. The adjustment to a new conflict means these scenes are essential, but they also weaken the story and ultimately prove that sometimes it’s better to just stick to the brief instead of going rogue.
Lioness Season 3 premieres August 2 on Paramount+.
- Release Date
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July 23, 2023
- Network
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Paramount+
- Directors
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John Hillcoat, Anthony Byrne, Paul Cameron, Stephen Kay, Taylor Sheridan
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Laysla De Oliveira
Cruz Manuelos
- Michael Kelly is a highlight of Season 3, with some of the sharpest scenes in the show so far.
- The visualization of the war in Ukraine is horrifying and honest, completely changing the aesthetic we’re used to with warfare.
- The departure from the “lioness” concept turns the show into any old spy thriller.
- There is far too much female nudity that seems to only exist to titillate.
- The two timelines of Season 3 make the show confusing and do not help the story at all.
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