“I see a really complicated women’s wartime history repackaged into something safer and sanitized for mass consumption," one former service member says


Zoe Saldana in "Lioness" (Credit: Ryan Green/Paramount+)

While taking creative liberties when making a television show is par for the course in Hollywood, that doesn't always mean the real-life counterparts to the source material are OK with it. That's the case with Taylor Sheridan's "Lioness."

The Paramount+ series kicked off its highly anticipated third season on Sunday. It stars Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman and 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.

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. The group had nothing to do with the CIA but was made up of mechanics, engineers and combat medics who joined male soldiers to protect translators and assist in searching women. At the time, the U.S. Department of Defense had a policy that excluded women from certain combat roles. Despite this, the women became some of the first female service members to engage in offensive ground combat operations in U.S. military history.

"It makes me mad that it doesn't follow what we did at all," Ranie Ruthig, one of the original Lionesses, told The Telegraph in an interview published Sunday. "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 Kate Guttormsen, a captain and the only female company commander in the 1st Engineer Battalion, the Lionesses "would do anything from going to schools and handing out soccer balls to finding intel."

"The term Lioness is now honorific," Daria Sommers, who co-directed a "Lioness" documentary about the team, said while discussing the "complex feelings" the show has created for the veterans. "The key thing is it has no basis in reality."

She continued: "I'm not critiquing Nicole Kidman or Zoe Saldaña – they should get all the kick-ass adventure roles they want. But if Taylor Sheridan had called the show something else, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"It feels like appropriation," Michelle Dallocchio, part of Team Lioness in 2004 and '05, added. "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."

TheWrap has reached out to Paramount for comment.

Sheridan has never purported that the show is a real-life adaptation, but rather that it was inspired by a true story. "The fun thing about 'Lioness,' which is, I can't say ripped from the headlines, because I've tried to guess what's going to happen politically and then fictionalize that," Sheridan said during a July interview on "The Joe Rogan Experience." "The fact that I've managed to be right is pretty [expletive] wild."

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