Special Ops: Lioness review – Zoe Saldaña’s war on terror drama needs an airstrike of imagination

You can probably guess what you’re getting from a show titled Special Ops: Lioness. The slightly clunky billing – “Special Ops”was appended to the title late in production – lets you know that this is a series about fraught modern warfare. A world of life-or-death stakes and stolid professionalism. Sure enough, the series begins in the Syrian desert, in media res. An espionage operation has gone awry: thanks to a tell-tale tattoo, an asset – a woman – has been compromised. There’s a cacophony of gunfire; as ISIS move in, CIA operative Joe (Zoe Saldaña) is forced to make a terrible decision.

It’s an explosive way to begin a series, for sure. From there, the episode (released on Paramount+) takes a breather. We get a glimpse of Joe’s home life. Her job spearheading the CIA’s “Lioness” initiative, which embeds women undercover with the wives and families of suspected terrorists, to keep tabs on the target and eventually allow the CIA to kill them. It’s ruthless work, and takes a ruthless personality – though Joe, we sense, has a heart underneath the layers of flint. As the failures of the Syrian mission are picked apart, Joe is handed a new prospect to work with, a hard-edged marine named Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira). We meet Cruz in a flashback, as she’s escaping from an abusive relationship. She takes refuge in an office of the US marines; before long, she’s become one of them.

That Lioness fails to ever really roar is a shame, given the pedigree of talent before and behind the camera. De Oliveira is porcupine-spiky on screen, and not helped by the predictable, dry writing. Nicole Kidman, playing another CIA figure, seems only half-engaged in the material. Michael Kelly (House of Cards) acquits himself better as Joe’s no-nonsense superior. The biggest name on the call sheet is Morgan Freeman, in a rare TV regular role. Not that he was present in episode one.

Saldaña, meanwhile, is one of the highest-grossing box office stars ever, thanks to roles in the Avatar and Marvel film franchises. While she’s wily enough in front of a green screen, there has always been a sense that the best is yet to come, that some meaty showpiece of a role lies just around the corner. On paper, Joe is this role: tough but morally conflicted. As it shakes out, Saldaña is an able lead, but not a memorable one.

Nothing about this series is, in fact, memorable. Lioness is created by Taylor Sheridan, the button-pushing writer of Sicario and director of Wind River and the excellent bank-robber drama Hell or High Water. Recently, Sheridan has built himself a minor TV empire, thanks to the massive stateside success of his Western drama Yellowstone. (Lioness is the seventh TV show he’s created since 2018, with two more in the works.) Judging by this, he may be spread a little thin. There are points where it feels reminiscent of Homeland – but without the intrigue of that show’s initial premise (“Is Damian Lewis a terrorist?”). It’s a double-life drama that – frankly – needs to get a life.