The real Lionesses were mechanics, engineers, and combat medics who went out with male soldiers in Iraq to protect translators and search female suspects. They say Lioness, the Paramount+ hit, erases what they actually did.
“It makes me mad that it doesn’t follow what we did at all,” Ranie Ruthig, one of the original Lionesses, 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.”
Michelle Dallocchio, who served on Team Lioness from 2004 to 2005, put it as “a really complicated women’s wartime history repackaged into something safer and sanitized for mass consumption, while erasing the actual women who lived it.”
A 2008 documentary also titled Lioness, from directors Daria Sommers and Meg McLagan, follows the real team and their PTSD after Iraq. “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.”
Jill Wagner, who plays CIA contractor Bobby, built these concerns into the pitch. She asked Sheridan to write a series for female heroes, worried someone else would grab the idea and churn out “Barbies with guns” first.
The series is also doing fine. Season 3, built around an attempted kidnapping tied to the war in Ukraine, pulled in more than 7 million viewers in its first week, per Variety.
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