Mr. Yellowstone’s latest show is for the ladies (who want to catch terrorists)

polygon.com:

Taylor Sheridan’s TV empire conjures up the image of a man on the vast plains of the West, knocking back a (domestic) beer and grunting ’murica with a mixture of admiration and sadness, before turning his eyes back to a weathered copy of one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated novels. Taylor Sheridan knows America better than you do: its might and its majesty, its joy and sorrow, who it celebrates, and most importantly, who it does not.

In the new Paramount Plus series Special Ops: Lioness, Sheridan turns his contemplative gaze to the women of the armed forces. Supposedly based on a real-life CIA task force, Lioness follows a team that places female operatives in the lives of women close to targets for assassination. It’s a nasty subject, the morality of which the show briefly acknowledges while breezily asserting its necessity and launching headfirst into the meat of the show: a character-driven spy thriller.

Lioness orbits around two women: Joe (Zoe Saldaña), who leads the Lioness team, and new recruit Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), a driven woman with nowhere to go but the Marines when her abusive boyfriend finally goes too far. Its first episode — the only one in the two-part premiere made available to critics in advance — is mostly concerned with grounding its characters in the audience’s mind through moments of crisis.

Viewers meet Joe during an operation gone wrong, when a Lioness agent gets made by enemy soldiers and Joe decides to drone strike the entire scene, sparing the Lioness from torture and humiliation while also protecting the secrecy of her program and not risking any of her support team in what would’ve likely been an unsuccessful rescue. It immediately signals the kind of person Joe is; while most