Lioness: Taylor Sheridan Strikes Again... and This Time Tells Us What He Really Thinks About Geopolitics

October 2026

 

Hey.. Taylor...

 

Tell me what you really think...

 

Because Lioness is a spy thriller..

 

That is really a Sheridan tutorial on geopolitics...

 

Served up between well-filmed fight scenes...

 

But more on the geopolitics in a minute...

Although that is the best part this series...

In that way only Taylor Sheridan can do...

 

But the boldness of this series was quite a surprise....

Even for Sheridan...

 

Now in the Lioness the armamentarium used by the world of US black ops...

Is so impressive ...

So you find yourself going...

 

Wow... they can really do that?

 

Physically...

 

And legally?

 

And we are all up in arms about Flock cameras?

 

Now initially I had the same reaction to the Lioness...

That I did to Scandal and House of Cards...

Which was that none of this could ever happen...

 

But then Seth Rich got killed...

Obama’s chef drowned in a puddle...

And there is the mystery of all those missing nuclear scientists...

 

So I’ve started to come to the conclusion that...

There are things that just sort of happen ...

The truth of which most of us will never know...

 

Now all of Taylor Sheridan’s series...

Play fast and loose with reality...

 

Like all those big shiny black SUVs running around are not going to attract any attention..

Or make it glaring obvious...

 

That the Feds have arrived...

 

That every negotiation in DC between spooks takes place in an expensive crowded restaurant..

 

That the logistics crew behind these special forces...

Can get a plane or a safe house in less than 10 minutes...

 

And that most of the women in this black ops crew are hot lesbians...

 

And the gung ho patriotism of the lead Lioness, Jo...

Played well by Zoe Saldana...

Was a little hard to buy...

 

Because I haven’t heard anyone talk that way since 9/11...

 

Now there are the usual Sheridan one liners to keep you entertained...

 

So a Russian diplomat casually mentions that the French don’t win wars...

Because, unlike the Russians...

They don’t have 20 million people to spare...

 

Ouch...

 

A US negotiator tells the Russian diplomat...

 

“You did give us our weed vaping basketball player back...”

 

And Jo points out that a Georgetown prof’s anti-capitalist ideology...

Stays conveniently on campus...

Whenever he heads out to his beach house on Hilton Head...

 

Now the first three seasons of Lioness..

Move from taking out a major funder of Middle Eastern terrorism...

To battling the cartels...in order to keep China out of Mexico...

 

But it gets real when they go to Ukraine in the third season...

Where the crew have an oh shit moment..

As they face a war of drones and dogs...

That takes away a lot of the high tech advantage they have relied upon for years...

 

And those scenes are truly terrifying...

 

Now the Russians, the Iranians, and the Ukrainians play key roles in the Lioness stories...

With the Chinese lurking in the background...

Because supposedly they don’t want a military confrontation...

Just our tech..

 

And to destroy our economy...

 

Now we are told that the Russians are basically a criminal enterprise wrapped in a thin cloak of nationalism...

That Ukraine is a money laundering operation full of gangsters and thieves...

Who rely on payoffs and bribes from US politicians and corporations....

 

So the only true ideologues in this geopolitical game are the Iranians ...

Which is why you can’t negotiate with them...

 

Hey Trump.. are you listening?

 

And unlike the Russians and the Chinese ...

Who are said to play a long game.....

And are careful not to poke the US Bear too much...

 

The Iranians act based on revenge... and the public projection of power...

That is primarily aimed at their domestic audience...

 

And so they are the loose cannons in this bunch...

Willing to take risks the others are not...

 

And if any of these folks want a hired gun... which they all do...

They get someone from Belarus...

 

But the real lessons imbedded in this series...

Which tell us what Sheridan really thinks about the geopolitical landscape..

Come in scenes where the long term geopolitical game is laid out...

With such clarity it takes your breathe away...

 

And it begins with a metaphor....

 

So we are told....

The Russians are a Wolf Pack..

The Chinese a Tiger...

And the US a Bear...

 

Neither the Wolf Pack nor the Tiger are strong enough to take down the Bear by themselves..

And they are too suspicious of each other to work together...

 

So instead they both pursue a similar strategy..

That infects the Bear with a disease...

That will weaken it ... and eventually destroy it...

From within...

 

And this is supposedly a long term plan...

That has been decades in its implementation...

 

And it all gets laid out ...

On a white board...in a scene set in Langley...

 

The first step is propaganda...

And the capture of key institutions...

 

So someone has obviously been reading Gramsci...

 

Which is battle space prep...

Using what Lenin called the “useful idiots”

In academia.. and the press...

 

Then next a campaign of disinformation and disruption...

Aimed at destabilization...

That employs foreign funding channeled to organizations in the US...

Primarily NGOS...and universities...

Who stage protests and put out information...

Helpful to the Wolf Pack and the Tiger...

Funneled through ideological fellow travelers in this country...

 

Then there are the foreign agents in the US...

Some come to study from abroad...with an agenda...

Others are recruited US citizens, corporate executives, members of the press..

Politicians and staffers...

Who are turned because of blackmail, ideology...or greed

 

And the Lioness...

Makes their activities a plot point...

 

The professor, a true believer in an anti-capitalist ideology...

Who in a scene in this series tells his students AI is going to take their jobs...

But the world will be more equitable place...

Where they will then work for the collective betterment of society

And not compensation...

 

He gives his exam answers ahead of time to his TA...

Who is there on a scholarship paid for by China...

Knowing he will give them to select students...

Studying tech and defense related subjects...

So they can cheat...

And then be blackmailed once they are in the workforce...

Into giving the Chinese information...

 

The politician who accepts campaign donations from a foreign government...

Laundered through series of nonprofits...

That he uses to fund his lifestyle...

 

And then there are others who are caught in a honeypot operations...

 

The list goes on..

 

And the infection spreads...

As it makes it way through this long planned march through multiple institutions..

 

Which in turn weakens each of them as it spreads...

Reducing the immunity...

And the country’s ability to resist the disease...

 

It’s an amazing litany to find in a series... even by Taylor Sheridan standards...

But it is done carefully..

Never pedantically...

 

And never linked to a particular administration...

 

And the Lioness never names real examples...

 

So these are brief vignettes sprinkled throughout the major focus of the series...

Which is special ops bravado...

So Sheridan just sort of slides them in...

In that Tommy Norris Landman way...

 

But then you start to think of Eric Swalwell and Fang Fang...

The mystery surrounding Diane Feinstein’s Chinese driver...

The arrest of Governor of New York’s Chief of Staff for spying...

The Chair of Chemistry Department at Harvard caught selling information to China...

The role of Neville Roy Singham, sitting in Shanghai with his Code Pink wife ...

Funding anti-AI campaigns in the US...

Through a complicated maze of non profits...

 

Things we are told to discount...

Because there is nothing of real import to see here...

 

But one scene in this series...

Parked between battles with the bad guys...

Involves the financier husband of the woman who runs the Lioness program...

As she is reading a headline in the newspaper...”The End of Democracy”

 

The wife comments... why do we see that kind of headline all the time?

And the husband replies.. why are you surprised?

How do you think these reporters were trained and who trained them?

 

At which point I went... Taylor you are really on a roll here...

 

Then the husband tells her Qatar alone gave $11 million to US universities...

China  $2.3 billion...

And the Chinese have paid $12 billion in tuition for their students to study here...

 

But he goes on...

 

“Why did you think parts of the US government continued to surreptitiously fund gain of function research with China...

After the Obama Administration outlawed it...

And then refused to investigate the Chinese lab origins of ensuing epidemic”

 

Wow...

 

That was not a subtle rant...

 

And one I did not expect to see on Apple TV...

 

So Taylor Sheridan continues to be full of surprises...

 

And once again... tells us what he really thinks...

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