Well, I liked Lioness immediately. Yes, the opening sequence where scores of faceless ISIS fighters are wiped out and an undercover female CIA recruit (a “lioness”) is violently sacrificed was sort of blunt-force—but one wants that from TV from time to time. And when Nicole Kidman appeared as an icy intelligence official in a tailored navy suit (“Walk us through your decision to call a drone strike,” she says to Joe), the casting struck me as so wonderfully implausible that I was sold immediately. (Among Lioness fans, Kidman’s performance is divisive, but to me she’s a highlight—arch, crisp, and impeccable.)
And Saldana! She acts her way through Lioness like she’s in a knife fight. Her character Joe lives a double life: She’s married to a handsome surgeon (Dave Annable) who also does all the cooking and cleaning and caring for their young daughters, while Joe jets off to far-flung battlegrounds to kill bad guys. No one does high-performance yelling like Saldana; no one looks better with wraparound shades and an assault rifle. I watched each new episode, week after week, thinking, yes, this is probably a bad show, even a morally dubious one, but I’m thoroughly gripped.
And then, lo and behold, Hale wrote another Times piece at the conclusion of the series, saying that he’d misjudged Lioness in his first review. This was actually high-quality genre TV that had hooked him just as it had hooked me. How satisfying! How true to the experience of actually watching TV, where there are so many shows and some need a moment to gain your trust. Also, does everything on TV have to be quite so…good? Who can live without small-screen guilty pleasures?
Lioness (without Special Ops in the title) is returning for its second season this weekend, and in my considered judgment (having previewed the first four episodes), I would like to say that the show absolutely rules. I shouldn’t make any straight-faced claims for it as a masterclass in new-wave feminism, but…I defy you to find more fearsome female characters on TV. In this season (no need to watch the first; you can jump in here), Joe is sent to the Mexican border to rescue an American congresswoman who has been kidnapped by a vicious cartel, her family murdered. Turns out, China may be collaborating with the bad guys to undermine US interests, and Joe, ever the patriot, must find a lioness to infiltrate and take out the cartel leader. The best candidate is a helicopter pilot in Iraq…with a hidden connection to the cartel.
