There’s no such thing as “immoral war,” Zoe Saldana’s CIA officer Joe somberly muses at one point in Season 2 of Paramount+’s Lioness. “There’s survival, and there’s surrender.” A philosophy that, incidentally, carries more than a little real-world resonance in light of Israel’s headline-making, nothing is off limits brand of warfare that we’ve seen play out in recent days — with the country’s shadow warriors remotely detonating pagers and other electronics carried by Hezbollah.
“How did we get to where we are today?” Morgan Freeman’s Secretary of State Edwin Mullins laments in the new season of Lioness, which hits Paramount+ on Oct. 27. “Nobody’s innocent. Nobody.”
One of a growing pile of Taylor Sheridan-connected shows in the Paramount+ stable, Lioness‘ success stems in part from the way it pairs a slew of movie stars (the show also features Nicole Kidman and Freeman, in addition to Saldana) with a proven hitmaker like Sheridan. Here, Sheridan — the TV creator behind shows like Yellowstone and Tulsa King — brings his storytelling chops to the global war on terror, with Lioness playing in all of the murky gray areas of that sprawling conflict.
And for some context around how successful the show has been for the network thus far, consider: Following its Season 1 launch back in July 2023, Lioness set a record as the most-watched series premiere worldwide for Paramount+, scoring almost 6 million total viewers before its first week was out. The show was inspired by a real-world US military program, and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Saldana raved about Sheridan that he “has a great deal of admiration for the real work that gets done when we’re all sleeping, so he takes it upon himself to highlight this world.”
In Season 2, the first trailer for which you can check out below, Paramount+ notes that “the CIA’s fight against terror moves closer to home.
“Joe (Saldaña), Kaitlyn (Kidman), and Byron (Kelly) enlist a new Lioness operative to infiltrate a previously unknown threat. With pressure mounting from all sides, Joe is forced to confront the profound personal sacrifices she has made as the leader of the Lioness program.”
