Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness Keeps Recycling the Same Conspiracy: Professors, Journalists, and Politicians Aren’t Just the Enemy; They’re the Deep (and Evil) State
· Thought Catalog
Updated 6 minutes ago, September 8, 2026
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness sells itself as a globe-trotting spy thriller, but watch all three seasons back to back and a pattern emerges. Season after season, the show keeps circling the same idea: that America’s professors, journalists, and politicians aren’t just adversaries — they’re the deep, and evil, state.
Start with the foreign threats, because they set the machinery in motion. Season 1’s target is an Iranian-backed militia leader in Iraq. Season 2 turns a border-and-cartel story into a U.S. strike on Iranian soil against a China-Iran nuclear plot. Season 3 spends five episodes pointing at Russia, then the September 6 episode reveals Iran paid Russian and Belarusian cutouts to abduct CIA officer Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) as explicit revenge for the Season 2 raid. An Iranian operative named Babat takes custody and cuts off her pinky toe.
Season 3 is where the domestic story hardens. Episode 5, “The Idiot Army,” lays out a covert foreign-influence network: TV network executives, senior editors at the Times and the Post, four district judges, two circuit judges, seven House members, and two senators (Olson and Mayer), with money moving through NGOs and campaigns.
Then Joe arrests Professor Richard Ealy mid-lecture on AI making wages obsolete and the state providing housing and health care, accusing him of feeding students exam answers so China’s Ministry of State Security can recruit them. Her fix is telling: not to expose the network but to privately flip the senators, judges, and editors and run them as U.S. sources.
The breakfast scene in Episode 1 sets the tone. Kaitlyn and Errol brush off an “End of Democracy” headline as fool’s gold, then Errol cites Qatar’s “over $11 billion” to U.S. universities and China’s “$2.3 billion since 2012” plus “$12 billion in tuition” for Chinese nationals, with graduates “espousing communist agendas.” The real end of democracy, he says, is AI.
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There’s a further irony in the name. The title comes from a real Marine program that started in Iraq in 2003, attaching female support soldiers to infantry units so they could search and speak with local women. It was not a CIA honeytrap unit.
Original members have said the show does not depict what they did. Ranie Ruthig: “They took the Team Lioness name and twisted it into a spy thing.” Daria Sommers, co-director of the 2008 documentary about the program, put it plainly: “The key thing is it has no basis in reality.” Michelle Dallocchio has called it appropriation of a women’s wartime history.
Season 1 even stages the shift on screen: a character says the job was “female soldiers to frisk and interrogate female insurgents,” then that it “evolved.” By Season 3, Cruz and Josie, the embedded operatives who gave the show its name, are on the back burner while Joe’s abduction runs the season.
Sheridan writes the episodes himself, has said Lioness “doesn’t choose a political side,” and told Bill Simmons in June he sometimes “rage-baits” critics and isn’t “trying to win Emmys.” Whatever the intent, the show keeps arriving at the same destination — and it’s worth asking what it’s really pointing at.
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