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Lioness (2023)

Lioness (2023)

Lioness (2023)

Lioness is a 2023 drama series created by Taylor Sheridan. It stars Zoe Saldaña, Laysla De Oliveira and Dave Annable.

Someone has to get close enough to be trusted, and someone else has to be the one who sends her. Cruz Manuelos is a rough-edged young Marine pulled out of her life and into the CIA's Lioness Engagement Team, tasked with working her way inside a terrorist organization to help bring it down. Joe runs the program. She recruits the operatives, trains them, aims them, then sits on the other end of a radio while they do the part nobody can do for them.

[[person:taylor-sheridan]] created the series, and the register is procedural: clipped shop talk, operational vocabulary left unexplained, action that lands hard and briefly. [[person:zoe-saldana]] plays Joe as someone good at the job and losing ground everywhere else. Laysla De Oliveira plays Cruz with the rawness of a recruit who has not yet learned what the work costs. Dave Annable, Jill Wagner, LaMonica Garrett and James Jordan fill out the team and the home front.

It premiered on Paramount+ in July 2023, also marketed as Special Ops: Lioness, with a second season in October 2024 and a third arriving in August 2026. Worth your time if you want espionage told as labor: cover stories, surveillance, the arithmetic of deniability, and the flat exhaustion of people who cannot tell anyone what they did today.

Where to watch Lioness

Stream: DirecTV On Demand, Paramount Plus, Paramount+ (Via Amazon Prime), Paramount+ (Via Apple TV), Spectrum On Demand, fuboTV

Watch free: The Roku Channel

Buy: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango at Home

Cast

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Explore Lioness guides

Lioness in our writing

A few thoughts on Lioness

Books first. Matahari covers the woman whose name became shorthand for the seduction-and-secrets version of spycraft; the show works in a colder register, closer to selection, training and risk management. In comics, The Rose of Versailles follows a woman raised into a soldier's life inside an institution built for men, carrying the same tension between duty and a self she never got to pick. Liar Game is the one for the mechanics of deception: holding a false position under pressure while reading everyone in the room. And Umizaru takes the training half seriously, a punishing selection program where the real question is whether the people beside you will hold when it counts.

Spy stories where the operative sent in is a woman

Lioness puts Cruz Manuelos inside a terrorist network because she can get close where a man cannot, and the show treats that access as a tactic with a price attached. These titles hand the same job to women: the recruitment pitch, the built cover identity, the friendship founded on a lie, and the handler listening on the other end.

When the cover story starts eating the real life

Joe runs the Lioness program by day and goes home to a marriage and two daughters she keeps lying to, so the series splits its tension between the field and the kitchen table. Pick these when the second life carries as much weight as the mission: spouses left guessing, operatives losing track of which story they told to whom.

Military and intelligence procedurals that skip the jargon lesson

Lioness talks the way soldiers talk: clipped radio traffic, acronyms nobody stops to define, briefings that assume you keep up. These shows and films run in the same register, following units through planning, rehearsal and the ugly part afterward, leaving the paperwork and the chain of command in rather than trimming them for pace.

Spy thrillers to read between seasons

Taylor Sheridan built Lioness from the material that fills spy paperbacks: deniable programs, operatives placed inside hostile organizations, case officers who spend a career aiming other people at targets. These novels give you the longer version, with the tradecraft on the page and agency politics doing as much damage to an operation as the enemy does.