Lioness

The camera is the first thing that announces itself. Paul Cameron, who shot the opening episodes and directed a pair of them, builds a kinetic visual grammar that deliberately abandons conventional rules of coverage. Fights are staged from where the stunt coordinator actually stood to watch them, then cut for maximum contact, so a punch registers as a punch rather than a stitched-together suggestion of one. The grade shifts by geography. Middle Eastern and Mexican settings carry a sepia heat; when the series later moves east, the palette turns cold and blue, a different climate for a different theatre of operation. It is a large-screen sensibility squeezed into episodic television, and by the second season the action set pieces are staged at a scale that genuinely competes with feature work.

Zoe Saldaña anchors all of it as Joe. She plays the role at full commitment, and the show is at its sharpest when it stages the collision between her duty to the mission and her obligations at home. Opposite her, Laysla De Oliveira works a wide register, moving between quiet, layered silences and rougher, looser bursts of dialogue without seams. Nicole Kidman turns up crisp and precise in a supporting role, and her casting has the pleasing implausibility of a movie star dropping into genre machinery and treating it seriously. The ensemble around them is deep. Whether the writing gives everyone enough to do is a fair question, and one the series does not always answer well.

That is the honest fault line. The craft is confident and the leads are formidable, but the scripts lean on assembled types more than fully built people, and the structure resolves its moral tensions as clean binaries rather than lived complications. What you make of Lioness depends on whether Sheridan's genre instincts feel authentic to you or merely efficient. There is a real argument, which the show earns in its strongest stretches, that this sits closer to Sicario than to formula. There is an equally real argument that it is competent counterterrorism television with a superb cast doing the heavy lifting. Both cases are alive here.

Watch it for Saldaña, for Cameron's camera, for the pleasure of large-scale action that refuses to shrink to fit its medium. Set your expectations for character depth accordingly, and let the leads carry you past the seams.

Now I can talk about the thing that makes Lioness genuinely interesting: its critical history is a story in itself. The pilot did not land well. One prominent critic, Mike Hale, scored it 40 out of 100 and said it looked like an awful lot of other counterterrorism thrillers, complete with a backlot feel to its Middle Eastern settings. Then he watched the whole season and published a reconsidered piece calling it high-quality genre TV that had hooked him. That about-face is worth sitting with. It suggests a show that screens badly in fragments and plays better as a sustained machine, which is exactly the kind of series that gets punished by episode-screener reviews.

The consensus never fully caught up. Season 1 settled at 56 with critics, a mixed-or-average verdict built on the idea that Saldaña brings the energy but the special ops material is derivative and unconvincing. Audiences were warmer at 6.1, and the launch set a record opening for its platform. That critic-audience gap is real, and I lean toward the audience read here, though not all the way. Kristen Baldwin's framing feels honest to me: the show escapes mediocrity thanks to its leads, a serviceable intelligence drama assembled from Strong Female Character parts.

The dissent has teeth, and I won't wave it off. The sharpest complaint is that Cruz reads as a jumble of focus-group-approved traits, introduced as a damsel fleeing a cartoonishly evil boyfriend, and that the show finds thin pretexts to strip her down. That is a specific, fair charge, and it points at the writing's real weakness. There's also the pattern accusation leveled at Sheridan generally: top-notch actors, questionable storytelling, and a female-marketed show that some viewers find surprisingly bro-centric underneath. Paul Dailly's narrower point lands too. Jill Wagner is treated as foundational and then given too little to do, which is symptomatic of an ensemble the scripts can't fully feed.

Against that, the acclaim case is not trivial. Taylor Antrim wrote that Saldaña acts her way through the show like she's in a knife fight and called these the most fearsome female characters on television. Matt Webb Mitovich went further on Season 2, giving it a perfect score and staging the Season 3 premiere as proof of the show's evolution: a flashforward ambush outside Joe's home, then a cold-blue Donetsk extraction with drones overhead and mortars erupting from the ground. The Season 2 finale set piece, by that account, rivals feature filmmaking. The trajectory matters. If Season 1 is the show finding its legs, the later work is where the ambition and the execution meet.

The Kidman question stays open. Antrim calls her arch, crisp, and impeccable, a highlight whose casting is wonderfully implausible. Others in the fan community find her divisive. I fall on Antrim's side, but I don't think the split is illegitimate; her register is pitched high enough that it either delights you or pulls you out, and reasonable viewers land in both camps.

One last wrinkle worth naming: the UK release appended a 'Special Ops' subtitle, and there's an argument that the tag primed critics to expect a jingoistic shooter and then judge it against that expectation. I don't know how much weight to put on it, but it's a tidy illustration of how framing shapes reception. Lioness is a show that has been fighting its own first impression since the pilot. On the evidence, the fight was worth having.