Lessons From "Lioness"
Strongly recommended viewing for your New Year's binging
Unless you’re a college football fan, New Year’s Day is the single most boring holiday on the calendar. OK, fine, for you parade enthusiasts, there are also parades.
Some people hold get-togethers, but folks mostly lay low. Whether we’re recuperating from skull-splitting, party-induced hangovers or merely the sheer exhaustion of staying up to watch the ball drop, the majority of us have a reduced movement radius on New Year’s Day that, typically, may not extend much further than our front doors.
Fortunately, we live in the age of streaming, which means that even if you’re just watching TV, you’re not stuck staring at a bowl game or a parade or a string of recycled holiday flicks. Push a few buttons on your remote, and you can access veritable libraries that contain thousands of hours of big and small screen entertainment.
So, if on Jan. 1, 2025 (or before or after), you find yourself with the binging itch but just don’t know what to binge, Americans Who Don’t Hate Each Other heartily offers the following recommendation:
“Special Ops: Lioness,” (2023) more commonly known as simply “Lioness.”
Before we get into how it relates to AWDHEO, let’s just stipulate upfront that this series is a gritty, gripping thrill-ride. The show revolves around a specialized CIA black ops assassination unit, the Lioness program. The outfit uses female operatives, or “lionesses,” to infiltrate terror cells by cultivating relationships to individuals who are close to whomever the intended target is and then using that access to kill the target.
Lionesses are backed by a full-time, heavily armed support team whose job is to exfiltrate the operatives after they have completed their missions—or eliminate them if it’s determined that they can’t be saved, in order to prevent them from being tortured into revealing information about the program (which is very loosely based on a real-life U.S. Marines unit).
Whether lionesses are extricated or terminated is ultimately determined by CIA Station Chief Joe McNamara (played by Zoe Saldana), who runs the program. Joe’s efforts are overseen by Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), a senior supervisor in the CIA. The girl-power factor is strong.
“Lioness” also extensively depicts Joe’s home life, showing the impossible balance that she tries—and consistently fails—to maintain between her identity as a clandestine operations officer for her country and a wife and mother for her family. In Season 1, while Joe is away on assignment, her daughter Kate (Hannah Love Lanier) is seriously injured in a car wreck, causing her to lose a baby that neither she nor anyone else knew that she was carrying. In Season 2, it’s Joe herself who, after she is critically injured on a mission, puts herself at grave risk by disregarding her doctor’s orders and immediately returning to the field, a choice that pushes her relationship with her husband Neal (Dave Annable), who is himself a doctor, to the brink.
A few more words on “Lioness” before we come to the anti-partisan connection. This is not a show for kids or those who prefer family values entertainment. It’s a series built around an elite, combat-hardened covert ops unit, made up of members who previously did multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They talk like you would imagine people who lived those experiences would talk. The F-words fly fast.
There are also nude and sex scenes, though they’re fairly moderate. Also, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), the lioness in Season 1 is bisexual and is currently pursuing relationships with women. And, oh yes, there’s a bit of violence. Quite a bit.
So, if this type of content doesn’t appeal to you, then this isn’t the show for you. That would be too bad, though, because not only would you be missing a highly compelling thriller and drama, but also one that voices political views that are, if not anti-partisan, at least anti-partisan-adjacent.
Season 1 is light on political messaging, at least until the end of the finale, titled “Gone is the Illusion of Order.” Then, the punchline is revealed, which provocatively calls into question the mission the entire season is centered around.
After being forced to complete the mission in an extremely brutal manner because her cover was blown, Cruz rages at Joe, who futilely tries to convince her that the mission still saved lives. As she tells Joe that she wants nothing to do with her or the Lioness program anymore, Cruz exits on a parting note that causes Joe to visibly question her own beliefs:
“I’ll tell you what we just did. Someday she’s going to have kids, and those kids are going to hear about how their grandfather died. And all we did was make the next generation of terrorists.”
Cruz’s mic-drop echoes Bush-era war resistance talk, but history has proven the argument largely correct. In Iraq, the vacuum after Saddam Hussein begat a new generation of terror in the form Isis, while, in Afghanistan, we invaded in 2001 to remove the Taliban from power, stayed for 20 years and left in 2021 with the Taliban back in control, only under new, younger leadership.
The second season of “Lioness,” in contrast, has a lot to say about the current state of our politics. In Episode 3, “Along Came a Spider,” there is a scene where Neal is cooking breakfast for his family and gets drawn into a conversation with daughters Kate and Charlie (Celestina Harris) about a biologically male, gender non-conforming cheerleader at the girls’ school. Neal diplomatically tries to find common ground by observing that there were guy cheerleaders in his time also, which leads to a striking exchange:
Charlie: They’re not a boy, dad. That’s not how they identify.
Neal: Oh. Okay, honey.
Charlie: You don’t believe him.
Neal: Uh, I don’t know him to believe him.
Kate: God, that’s so transphobic.
Neal: Trans—Charlie, look at me. The definition of ‘phobia’ is “the extreme or irrational fear of something.” Disagreeing with somebody is not a phobia.
Kate: Well, you are denying that they exist.
Neal: I’m not denying anything.
Kate: Well, you’re refusing to believe someone that says they…
Neal: Okay, Kate, let me explain something to you. If the only way to promote an idea is to eliminate any argument against that idea, then you have no idea.
Kate: Oh my God. You did not just say that.
Neal: Mm-hmm
Joe: You’re digging a deeper hole there, buddy…. What your father means is ideas are meant to be challenged. He has the right to disagree with you. And you have the right to disagree with him. There are nations where that right doesn’t exist, and those are the places you do not want to visit.
Left-leaning reviewers have criticized this scene, predictably, without an iota of self-awareness. Writing for “Salon,” Matt Valentine particularly bristles at Neal’s first sound bite (which should be plastered on billboards across America), “Disagreeing with somebody is not a phobia.”
Valentine mocks Neal’s position. “Did you get that? He’s not transphobic; he’s not extreme or irrational,” Valentine scoffs. “He merely ‘disagrees’ with somebody. About their gender.”
Well, no, that’s not what Neal said. Nowhere in the dialogue does he deny that the cheerleader is non-binary. He merely points out that he isn’t acquainted with the individual in question, so he has no basis to accept or deny the claim.
According to progressive, identitarian orthodoxy, this is still heresy. If people of any age identify themselves as transgender, then that assertion must be accepted at face-value.
Now, I know next to nothing about the medical dimension of the gender identity debate. But, I do know that it’s a medical question. And while Neal may not be a gender care specialist, he is a doctor, which puts him in a better position to discern these matters than his daughters or smug entertainment critics. And given that teens between 13 and 17 are, dumbfoundingly, almost three times as likely as adults to identify as trans, the evaluation of a medical professional concerning a gender-dysphoric minor would seem to carry weight.
Anyway, the real message in the scene is contained in Neal’s second money quote— “if the only way to promote an idea is to eliminate any argument against that idea, then you have no idea.” This statement should also appear on signs everywhere.
In his recap of the episode, “Esquire” reviewer Josh Rosenberg testily bypasses Neal’s words, harrumphing in response, “I don’t have time for this.” Apparently, the columnist simply can’t abide the notion that even strongly felt political beliefs must be subject to counterargument.
It’s a neat little trick to avoid the need to defend your views: simply define any criticism as bigoted resistance to the truth. And this ploy is really just a spin on a standard partisan operating procedure: attribution of malice. You take any arguments that counter your positions and attribute hateful inspiration to them, thus rendering any disagreement with your positions as out of bounds. It’s a terrific way to sidestep your way to victory in a political debate without actually having to go through the trouble of making a substantive argument.
It’s also the same approach that fundamentalist religious believers take when they are confronted with ideas that contradict their faith. Devout followers define opposition to their beliefs as simple, pure evil. They consider the teachings of their religions to be infallible and not subject to criticism. The truth of their ideas don’t have to be tested. Other ideas have to be tested against their truth.
But, in resorting to this evasion, Rosenberg actually proves Neal’s point. Because if you rule out dissent to an idea or belief, what you have isn’t really an idea or a belief at all, but a proclamation. An edict about what to think. A decree on what to believe.
[to be continued…]
Special Ops: Lioness (2023) was created by Taylor Sheridan and streams on Paramount+
Portions of this post have been inspired by my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
Follow me on X at @JeffGebeau or on Facebook