Lioness

The Zoe Saldaña-led spy thriller’s sophomore run is fantastic, and stands as one of the year’s best TV shows.

The first episode serves as a mostly successful setup, but much of what the show will become remains top secret. There's also a question of how this budget will be spread around; is the opening scene with all its helicopters and explosions a sign of what's to come, or just a big show to get viewers instantly hooked? I don't know, but the intel we do have on the rest of the series says it has some promise.

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.

For Lioness, Sheridan has assembled a handful of Strong Female Character tropes and sent them to war — resulting in a serviceable intelligence drama that escapes mediocrity thanks to its two leads.

What can be said about “Special Ops” from its first 42 minutes is that it looks like an awful lot of other counterterrorism thrillers, with a visceral punch to its action and a ticky-tacky, backlot feel whenever it moves in close on its Middle Eastern settings. Saldana registers stoic magnetism, as usual, as the overseer of the operation.

There’s a place for what amounts to meat-and-potatoes TV, even in the prestige-conscious streaming world. Nevertheless, when it comes to training an audience to come back week after week, “Special Ops: Lioness” feels about as basic as it gets.

It is perhaps predictable that the Sheridan take on pop feminism would weaponize women’s liberation in service of the military industrial complex. After all, that rhetorical sleight of hand is as much a cliché as the rest of “Lioness,” which shows the strain of a single writer cranking out scripts for each of his half-dozen shows on air. “Lioness” may be a first for its creator in some respects, but in others, it’s more of the same.

Loved it. Saldana, Kidman & Michael Kelly are fantastic. Edge of seat thriller. Can’t wait for season 2.

Even though Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman are the stars, they play bosses of the woman doing the work (Laysla De Oliveira). She's a new recruit to the special secret ops group and her mission is to befriend the daughter of a wealthy funder for terrorists. Her training and subsequent involvement forms the crux of the story with the other 2 women confronting the political and logistical consequences. Creator Taylor Sheridan has placed the emphasis on female characters with their personal relationships adding an emotional connection, but the thrust is really about the covert ops. There are a few moments of tough physical encounters to maintain the action adjective, but the focus is on the mental challenges these characters face, so there's lots of Sheridan's spicy chatter punctuated by spurts of violence.

Season 1 was stunning, season 2 turned out to be a rehash with the same romance arc and everything. Also that battle in the final episode was awful, like Iron Eagle 2 awful. Whoever designed and choreographed that should never be allowed near military hardware on film again.

What started out promising drifted midway through and then ended very poorly. Zoe was superb. I thought her character was well written and acted. The other star power really pulled their weight too. But ultimately the show devolved into weak story telling, over acted characters, and unbelievable plot points. I knew halfway through it wouldn’t end well. Way too much drama devoted to side characters and backstory that was needless. I actually fast forwarded through most of that to just watch the operational parts. It’s truly sad because this show could have been so much better and really launched a new series. But with how this one played out I wouldn’t bother watching another.

This show aims itself at the male audience through military, weapons and special forces with a mission to inject feminist agenda that women are victims to sexual harassment/assault propaganda in a simple exchange **** story. If this was real life the main character would have no issue going through any of that.