Real-Life Team Lioness Veterans Criticize Taylor Sheridan Series for Distorting Their History

Real-life members of Team Lioness are criticizing Taylor Sheridan‘s Paramount+ series for using the military program’s name while depicting a substantially different mission.

Ranie Ruthig and Michelle Dallocchio, who served with Lioness teams during the Iraq War, addressed the show in a new interview with The Telegraph.

“It makes me mad that it doesn’t follow what we did at all,” Ranie said. Although she enjoys some of Taylor’s other work, she believes he “took our history and kind of corrupted it.”

The real Team Lioness emerged during the Iraq War in 2003. Female service members, including mechanics, engineers, and medics, were attached to ground-combat units so they could search Iraqi women at checkpoints and during other operations, per The Wrap.

The teams also protected translators, gathered intelligence, and built relationships with local communities, among other essential duties. They were frequently placed in combat situations despite the military policies that restricted women from being formally assigned to certain ground-combat roles.

Taylor‘s Lioness instead follows a covert CIA program that recruits women to infiltrate the lives of terrorism suspects. Zoe Saldana stars as CIA officer Joe McNamara, with Nicole Kidman playing senior official Kaitlyn Meade.

Michelle, who served with Team Lioness in 2004 and 2005, said the show’s use of the name “feels like appropriation.” She argued that the series repackages the veterans’ complicated wartime history while leaving the actual women out of the narrative.

“I see a really complicated women’s wartime history repackaged into something safer and sanitised for mass consumption – while erasing the actual women who lived it,” she said.

Daria Sommers, who co-directed the 2008 documentary Lioness with Meg McLagan, similarly stressed the fictional CIA operation has no basis in the real program. She said the disagreement would not exist if the show had used a different name.

“The term Lioness is now honorific,” Daria told the outlet.

“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,” she continued.

Lioness is currently airing its third season, with new episodes arriving Sundays on Paramount+.

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