Real Lioness Operatives Accuse Taylor Sheridan of Corrupting Their History

2 min readBelieve it or not, Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman’s CIA drama, Lioness, isn’t exactly accurate. Naturally, it’s par for the course for Hollywood productions to amp up the action and exaggerate the story. So, even though Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan based his all-female CIA task force on a real-life operation, it makes sense that there’s very little in common between the actual Lioness operatives and their Hollywood counterparts.Still, it’s not great when the actual Lioness operatives aren’t fans of their on-screen depictions. In an interview with The Telegraph, Ranie Ruthig, one of the original Lionesses, stated that Sheridan’s Paramount+ series—now its in third season—does very little to celebrate the group’s true milestones. “It makes me mad that it doesn’t follow what we did at all,” Ruthig told The Telegraph. “They took the Team Lioness name and twisted it into a spy thing. I like Taylor Sheridan’s writing—I’ve watched his other shows—but he took our history and kind of corrupted it.”According to Ruthig, her group was the first all-female team to engage in offensive combat ground operations in U.S. military history. They were formally all mechanics, engineers, and combat medics, who joined the male soldiers to protect translators and aid in body-searching female suspects. “We would do anything from going to schools and handing out soccer balls to finding intel,” another Lioness team member said, and the group thought that Sheridan’s TV series would finally honor their mission.“It feels like appropriation,” added Michelle Dallocchio, who was a member of Team Lioness from 2004 to 2005. “I see a really complicated women’s wartime history repackaged into something safer and sanitized for mass consumption—while erasing the actual women who lived it.”Emerson MillerLioness season 3 garnered over 7 million views in its first week.If you’re looking for something to watch about the real Lionesses, a 2008 documentary by directors Daria Sommers and Meg McLagan, also titled Lioness, explores the real team and their struggles with PTSD after they return home from Iraq. Sommers also dissects Sheridan’s TV series in a twelve-episode podcast titled The Lioness Origin Story. “I’m not critiquing Nicole Kidman or Zoe Saldaña—they should get all the kick-ass adventure roles they want,” Sommers told The Telegraph. “But if Taylor Sheridan had called the show something else, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”Though the series appears inaccurate to the real Lioness operation, viewers consistently praise the show’s action and twisting plots. Season 3, which follows an attempted kidnapping around the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, drew in over 7 million viewers in its first week, per Variety.Sheridan first heard the idea for Lioness from actress Jill Wagner, who plays CIA contractor Bobby on the Paramount series. Wagner reportedly told Sheridan at the time that she wanted to make a series for female heroes and was worried that someone else would snatch up the idea and just put out “Barbies with guns.” At the very least, you can say that Lioness aims for something much greater—even if it’s nowhere near the operation from which it draws its name. After all, Lioness storylines often end nowhere near where they began.