There’s plenty to get excited about with Special Ops: Lioness, the action-packed new show from creator Taylor Sheridan, starring Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman, and Morgan Freeman. Adam Fresco is here with your classified briefing.
Here are seven scintillating reasons to enter the lioness’s den for what promises to be eight episodes of globe-trotting, action-packed drama, and adventure.
Special Op 1: Story!
Inspired by a real-life US Military program, Special Ops: Lioness centres on special operative Joe. She is a lead agent in the covert Lioness Program, established to tackle terrorism and prevent the next attack. But Joe must balance her life as a top agent with her personal life.
That’s the set-up teased by the trailer, which promises high-octane adventure, international intrigue, exciting espionage, and personal drama. All this plus a host of A-list acting talent and well-known faces, in a show set to deliver top-notch performances and all-out action, in a story focused on female undercover operatives. No superpowers. No futuristic setting. This is a tale about real people in extraordinary circumstances, in a global adventure ripped from today’s headlines.
Special Op 2: Saldaña!
Leading a powerhouse female cast as Joe is Hollywood superstar, Zoe Saldaña, star of James Cameron’s Avatar movies, and James Gunn’s Guardians of The Galaxy series. Saldaña is no stranger to the action genre. Her resume also includes films like The Adam Project, her starring role in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot films as Lieutenant Uhura, and as the lead in Oliver Megaton’s Luc Besson-produced revenge actioner Colombiana.
In Saldaña you have a star who can think, kick, punch, stab, shoot, or talk her way out of deadly situations as a convincing kick-ass hero, with brains as well as brawn backing up her deadly skill sets.
Saldaña’s Joe leads The Lioness Program’s agents. Their mission? To go undercover, and befriend the women key to the lives of the terrorists the intelligence services are seeking to infiltrate, and ultimately thwart. In episode one, after an assignment in Syria goes awry, Joe recruits Cruz, a newbie Marine (played by Laysla De Oliveira), to befriend a leading terrorist’s daughter, and obtain the information required to strike first, and avert disaster.
If international terrorist threats aren’t enough for Joe to deal with, she’s also trying to hold her marriage together. For a character dealing with both family drama and fights to the death, Saldaña seems perfectly cast. It’s her experience playing both action hero, and converying relatable, realistic emotions that make her the ideal casting choice for an undercover agent with action chops, someone who can also deliver when it comes to emotional punch.
Special Op 3: Kidman!
Overseeing Saldaña’s Joe, and The Lioness Program, is Kaitlyn Meade, played by Hollywood heavyweight Nicole Kidman. From the Australian-born actor’s breakthrough role in Philip Noyce’s thrilling Dead Calm to her leads in hit movies (Baz Luhrmann’s musical Moulin Rouge!, Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, her role as Jason Momoa’s mother in Aquaman, and a remarkable turn as the lead in Karyn Kusama’s neo-noir revenge drama Destroyer), Kidman has a glittering movie career.
In recent years, Kidman’s carved a name for herself as producer and star of hit, high quality prestige TV series, including Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, Top of The Lake: China Girl and The Undoing. So, when it comes to casting the boss of Saldaña’s intelligent, kick-ass hero, Kidman looks like the perfect choice.
Watching Kidman’s career it’s clear she has evolved as an actor, becoming increasingly confident and bold in her choices, rejecting the early Hollywood stereotypes that couldn’t pass the Bechdel Test. In Special Ops: Lioness, Kidman’s role as supervisor of a covert program, designed to use women to get close to lead terrorists, looks to be yet another character challenging the patriarchy in terms of roles traditionally assigned to male actors. A refreshing change, and an opportunity for action and drama fans to experience Saldaña and Kidman working together as what promises to be a truly dynamic duo.
Special Op 4: Freeman!
Morgan Freeman plays Edwin Mullins, US Secretary of State. In the teaser trailers for the show, it’s Mullins who asks the tough questions about the covert Lioness Program. But does he support a secret unit designed to infiltrate terrorist networks? If you’re a fan of Freeman’s assured acting and sonorous voice, like me, you’ll tune in to find out.
From his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, to his numerous other leading roles (Se7en, The Shawshank Redemption, the Dark Knight trilogy), Freeman is an actor of huge dramatic heft. Whether playing the President or a chauffeur, his range of roles in modern Hollywood cinema is amazing to behold.
Freeman’s a formidable actor, but as his past roles show, you never know if you’re going to get the good guy, the villain, or that shady operator in between. Freeman’s experienced at playing both nice and nasty, to the point that audiences now never quite know what they’re gonna get. So, unless you’re needing a voice to narrate penguins on the march, when it comes to casting someone in a position of power whose allegiances are never totally certain, you can’t get a better man than Freeman.
Special Op 5: Directors!
Judging by the show’s choice of directors, Special Ops: Lioness is keen to balance top-tier drama with pulsating action, drawing on some of the best talent working on screens big and small today.
The list of directors working on the first few episodes reads like a who’s who of modern drama and action. There’s Australian director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road and Lawless). Hillcoat has also directed episodes of TV drama hit Black Mirror and music biopic George & Tammy. Then there’s cinematographer turned director Paul Cameron (cinematographer on hit sci-fi show Westworld, and films like Michael Mann’s Collateral), and Anthony Byrne, who cut his teeth on high-quality TV dramas Peaky Blinders and The Last Kingdom.
So, when it comes to directing talent, Special Ops: Lioness is clearly keen to deliver action, drama, and top-notch visuals.
Special Op 6: Spies!
From Jack Ryan to James Bond, spies make for great entertainment—the worlds of espionage, counter-espionage, surveillance, international law enforcement and global terror-prevention lend themselves to works of dramatic fiction like no other. If it’s tension you seek, there’s plenty to be mined by setting Special Ops: Lioness in the world of agents going deep undercover so as to befriend the women in terrorist leaders’ lives
The twist is the show’s central focus on women as the heroes. It’s an overdue update on a genre traditionally dominated by men, that allows for both unique drama, intelligent plotting, complex characterisation, and the kind of pulse-pounding action genre fans expect.
Special Op 7: Sheridan!
If I said “Taylor Sheridan is back with a new series”, I’d be lying—because he never went away. The guy is everywhere. From writing and directing hit movies, to acting, directing, producing, and creating some of today’s most successful television series, Sheridan is a one-man creative powerhouse.
He wrote Dune director Denis Villeneuve’s gritty Mexican cartel crime hit Sicario and its sequel, as well as modern Western crime drama Hell or High Water, before writing and directing Wind River (starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen), and Angelina Jolie fire ranger drama Those Who Wish Me Dead.
By many metrics Sheridan’s Yellowstone is the most watched fictional series in the Western world, and has been so successful that Sheridan has so far created two spin-off series, prequels 1883 and 1923—with more to come. And, along with co-writer and showrunner Terrence Winter (Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos), Sheridan created the Sylvester Stallone TV series Tulsa King, in which Sly plays a fish-out-of-water New York mobster who winds up kicking ass and saddling-up in present-day cowboy country. Little wonder The Hollywood Reporter called Sheridan a “hitmaker who created his own genre of neo-Western storytelling.”
In this formerly male-dominated world of modern macho cowboys, and kick-ass cops, female-led action drama Special Ops: Lioness looks to be another jewel in Sheridan’s stetson. Having created such an eclectic batch of hit TV shows, screenplays, and movies, he’s perhaps the biggest reason I’m psyched, hyped, and ready to fight for the TV remote when it comes to seeing Special Ops: Lioness.
