Taylor Sheridan trades ranches and border towns for covert operations rooms in Special Ops: Lioness, a 2023 thriller built around a CIA program that recruits Marines for missions no official record will ever show.
What is Special Ops: Lioness about?
At the center of the show is Joe, a CIA officer running the Lioness Program, a real-world-inspired operation that embeds women undercover to get close to targets in the war on terror. Joe recruits Cruz, a hard-edged Marine Raider, and prepares her for a life where the mission and the cover identity have to feel like the same person. Much of the tension comes from the gap between the two worlds Joe has to hold together: the classified operations she runs and the family life waiting for her when the mission ends, if it ends. The series moves between Washington's chain of command and the field, showing how decisions made in a briefing room translate into risk for the operatives carrying them out. It's less interested in action-movie spectacle than in the toll of sustained deception, and in what it costs the people asked to disappear into someone else's life for the sake of the operation.
About the cast
Zoe Saldaña anchors the series as Joe, with Laysla De Oliveira as Cruz, the recruit thrown into undercover work. Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman appear in the chain of command above the operation, alongside Dave Annable, Jill Wagner, LaMonica Garrett, and James Jordan rounding out the ensemble.
Context & significance
The show comes from Taylor Sheridan, whose recent run of series has built a reputation for grounding genre premises in procedural detail, and it draws its premise from the real CIA program that inspired its title, giving the undercover missions a texture closer to reporting than pure spectacle.
Watching Special Ops: Lioness on Ktime
Special Ops: Lioness is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Farsi subtitles, letting viewers follow the operation in their own language. The page is free to read without an account; watching the series itself requires a K-Time login, part of a Farsi-first streaming experience built for the diaspora audience.