When a prestige drama borrows its name from a real military unit, the people who earned that name get no say in what gets done with it afterward. Three seasons in, the women on the wrong end of that arrangement have gone on the record, and they aren’t being especially diplomatic about it.
Taylor Sheridan‘s Lioness, now midway through its third season, is loosely inspired by Team Lioness, an improvised arrangement formed in 2003 that sent female support soldiers out alongside infantry in Iraq because local custom prevented male troops from searching women. ‘Loosely’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The Paramount+ series stars Zoe Saldana as a CIA station chief running a program of undercover operatives, and speaking to The Telegraph, several of the original Lionesses said it bears almost no relation to what they actually did.
The real Team Lioness had nothing to do with the CIA. They were clerks, mechanics, engineers, and other support specialists from the 1st Engineer Battalion, 19 women in all, sent out in pairs in October 2003 after Colonel David Brinkley agreed to attach them to infantry patrols. By the spring of 2004, they were engaged in sustained firefights in Ramadi without any combat training, while an official exclusion policy held that they weren’t there at all.
Ranie Ruthig, a mechanic who paired with Shannon Morgan on house searches, told The Telegraph she likes Sheridan’s writing and has watched his other shows, but that “he took our history and kind of corrupted it.” Michelle Dallocchio, who arrived with the second wave of Lionesses in 2004, called it appropriation, describing a complicated piece of women’s wartime history repackaged into something safer while the women who lived it get written out. Rebecca Martinez, whose regular role was logistics and unit supply, put it more succinctly, saying she won’t be finishing the series.
Coming home, the Lionesses found the VA reading their paperwork rather than their experience, and Martinez has described being told she couldn’t have PTSD because she was a support specialist and a woman. Their testimony on Capitol Hill helped force the Department of Defense to drop the combat exclusion policy in 2013. Daria Sommers, who co-directed the 2008 documentary Lioness and later launched a podcast with the veterans, wrote that they “feared disappearing from their own story.”
The production’s own framing has shifted, too. Jill Wagner, the executive producer who took the idea to Sheridan after hearing about the unit from 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. Not every Lioness has stopped watching, though. Kate Guttormsen, the battalion’s only female company commander, reckons she’ll keep going, largely because her husband is a fan.
- Release Date
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July 23, 2023
- Network
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Paramount+
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Laysla De Oliveira
Cruz Manuelos
