The return of Taylor Sheridan’s all-female CIA special ops unit finds the war on terror cutting uncomfortably close to the bone, with team boss Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) targeted by a bunch of thuggish Russians in her own home in Virginia. Scenes of Joe being violently manhandled and strip-searched by her attackers as they search for the locator device they know is concealed somewhere on, or in, her body make for pretty gruelling viewing, even in a show that doesn’t shrink from graphic violence.
However, even that pales into insignificance by comparison to the combat scenes in the opening episode. Here, Joe and her team were flown out to a battlefield in Ukraine to capture a senior member of Russian intelligence, Aleksi Yurimov, after getting a tip-off about his location from a Ukrainian double agent who’d managed to infiltrate the Russian foreign intelligence service. The battle sequences are as intense and brutal as anything you'll encounter on screens large or small (pictured below, Morgan Freeman as Secretary of State Mullins).
Under gloomy and thunderous skies, dense swarms of drones zoom back and forth, obliterating anything that moves, while troops cower in muddy trenches before being ordered to make bayonet charges. There’s a team of covert American “advisers” on the spot, and one of them suggests that the fighting here is like “World War One meets Star Wars”. Horrifically, the Ukrainians are seen using specially-trained attack dogs which dash into the enemy positions and start mauling the opposition mercilessly (most of the enemy troops seem to be North Koreans, enlisted by the Russians).
Nobody seems to care about the rapidly-escalating body count, with the Americans shooting the enemy wounded because they don’t have any medics to tend to their injuries. One of the few moments when anyone displays any real emotion is when one of the dogs is killed. Meanwhile, the Americans successfully grab their Russian target, and blithely murder everybody else who they find with him in his bunker. They say war is hell, but on this showing it's far worse (pictured below, Nicole Kidman as Kaitlyn Meade).
After an ordeal as appalling as this, it’s hardly surprising that Zoe finds it difficult to readjust to life back home with her husband and young daughters. Her husband Neal is played with a kind of avuncular tolerance by Dave Annable, and his vocation as a paediatric oncologist places him on a rather different emotional spectrum from the one inhabited by his wife. Although I suppose she might argue that they both do what they do for the greater good. Quite how Neal copes with Zoe’s top-secret double life, which may involve her vanishing for weeks on end on top-secret missions or shooting dead some dodgy characters who appear at their front door pretending to be cops, is one of Lioness’s great mysteries.
Still, it’s an expertly-mounted show which makes you believe this sort of stuff, or something like it, really does go on in the undercover world, though almost certainly with a less glamorous cast. A scene featuring Zoe in the gym verges on fitness-porn, while her colleague Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) has a lesbian bath scene you certainly wouldn’t get in Slow Horses. Supporting roles include Morgan Freeman as US Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (harking back to a mythical time when politicians exuded probity and gravitas), and Michael Kelly as the CIA's tersely authoritative Byron Westfield. Oddly, the weakest link is Nicole Kidman, who plays Zoe’s boss Kaitlyn Meade. She just seems too petulant and self-regarding to be plausible.
- New episodes of Lioness are released every Sunday on Paramount+
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