Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Lioness’ Faces Backlash From the Real Women Whose Story Inspired It
Taylor Sheridan has built an empire out of turning American institutions into prestige television, but his Paramount+ spy drama ‘Lioness‘ is now facing pushback from an unexpected source. The real women who served on the original Team Lioness say the show borrowed their name while erasing almost everything else about their story.
As season three of ‘Lioness’ continues its run on Paramount+, several veterans who were part of the actual program have gone public with their frustration, arguing that Sheridan based the show on the real-life Team Lioness, which was formed by the U.S. Marine Corps during the Iraq War in 2003. What started as a marketing hook has turned into a genuine controversy over who gets to tell this history.
Real Veterans Say Taylor Sheridan Corrupted Their History
The most pointed criticism comes from Ranie Ruthig, one of the original Lionesses, who told The Telegraph that it makes her mad the show doesn’t follow what they actually did. Ruthig said the production took the Team Lioness name and twisted it into a spy thing, adding that while she likes Sheridan’s writing and has watched his other shows, she feels he corrupted their history.
Other veterans have echoed that sentiment in stronger terms. Rebecca Martinez, whose job with the unit was logistics and supply, put it bluntly by saying she won’t be finishing the series.
Michelle Dallocchio, who served with the group in 2004 and 2005, said the show’s use of the name feels like appropriation, arguing that a complicated women’s wartime history has been repackaged into something safer and sanitized for mass consumption while the women who actually lived it are left out of the narrative.
Daria Sommers, who co-directed the 2008 documentary ‘Lioness’ about the unit, framed the disagreement differently. She noted that the term Lioness has become honorific among veterans and stressed that she isn’t critiquing Nicole Kidman or Zoe Saldaña, who she said should get to play any kick-ass adventure role they want. Her issue is squarely with the choice to reuse the name at all, since she believes none of this controversy would exist if Sheridan had simply called the show something else.
What The Original Team Lioness Actually Did
Understanding the frustration requires knowing what the real unit was. According to reporting on the veterans, the group had nothing to do with the CIA and was instead made up of mechanics, engineers and combat medics who joined male soldiers to protect translators and assist in searching female suspects.
Captain Kate Guttormsen, the only female company commander in the 1st Engineer Battalion, described their actual duties as ranging from humanitarian outreach to intelligence gathering, saying they would do anything from going to schools and handing out soccer balls to finding intel.
Ruthig has said her group holds a genuine place in military history, since her team was the first all-female unit to engage in offensive combat ground operations in U.S. military history. Beyond the battlefield, the fallout from their service followed many of them home.
Reporting on the veterans notes that the women found the VA reading their paperwork rather than their actual experience, with Martinez describing being told she couldn’t have PTSD because she was a support specialist and a woman. Their advocacy eventually mattered on a policy level too, since their testimony on Capitol Hill helped push the Department of Defense to drop its combat exclusion policy in 2013.
Paramount+ Show’s Creative Team Has Acknowledged the Gap
Notably, the discrepancy between the fictional CIA operation and the real Army and Marine unit hasn’t gone entirely unaddressed by the people behind the show. Jill Wagner, the executive producer who originally pitched the concept to Sheridan after hearing about the unit through her husband, has conceded that the show’s use of the name is symbolic and that the real Lionesses didn’t do what the series portrays.
That admission lines up with how differently the fictional ‘Lioness’ operates on screen. The Paramount+ version follows a top-secret CIA task force that uses female soldiers to befriend the wives and daughters of terrorists in an effort to stop major attacks from the inside, a far cry from the support roles the real women filled in Iraq. Not every veteran has cut ties with the show over the discrepancy, either. Guttormsen has said she plans to keep watching, largely because her husband is a fan of the series.
Critics Still Praise Sheridan’s Spy Thriller Despite The Controversy
Even as the accuracy debate plays out, ‘Lioness’ has continued to gain critical traction with each new season. The show’s season three premiere landed an 86 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, a notable jump from season one’s 54 percent, with critics highlighting its escalating action and personal stakes as it delivers a lean, mean espionage thriller that mirrors current geopolitical tensions.
Not every reviewer has been fully on board, though, with one critic writing that the show continues to lack the depth of Sheridan’s other work despite all the shooting, swearing and excitement.
Zoe Saldaña, who leads the cast as CIA officer Joe McNamara, has defended Sheridan directly against a separate line of criticism about how he writes women, saying during a television appearance that she loves working with men who really see women and know how to write them, and that Sheridan writes great, complex, wholesome women who aren’t meant to be perfect. That defense, however, doesn’t directly address the veterans’ specific complaint, which centers less on how the female characters are written and more on whose real history got borrowed to build the show around them.
With ‘Lioness’ continuing to pull strong ratings even as the women it borrowed its name from speak out, it raises a genuinely uncomfortable question for anyone who has been following along week to week. Should audiences feel differently about a hit spy thriller once they know the real Lionesses say their story was taken and repackaged without them?
