Real Lioness operatives are pushing back on Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ series, saying the show borrowed their name and turned their wartime history into something else entirely. Ranie Ruthig said the series does very little to honor the group’s real milestones and that it “doesn’t follow what we did at all.”
The criticism lands now because Lioness is in its third season and still pulling in viewers as an action-heavy spy drama. That keeps the gap between the screen version and the real Team Lioness story in front of audiences who may assume the show is rooted closely in fact.
Ruthig, who said the Team Lioness name was taken and “twisted it into a spy thing,” added that Sheridan “took our history and kind of corrupted it.” Michelle Dallocchio, who said she served with Team Lioness from 2004 to 2005, called the series “appropriation” and said it repackages a “complicated women’s wartime history” into something “safer and sanitized for mass consumption” while erasing the women who lived it. Those comments go to the heart of the dispute: Sheridan based Lioness on a real-life operation, but the people who served in it say the show uses their history as a shell for fiction.
That history is not small. The real Team Lioness was the first all-female team to engage in offensive combat ground operations in U.S. military history. Its members were formally mechanics, engineers and combat medics who worked alongside male soldiers to protect translators and help with body-searching female suspects. One team member described the mission in plain language: “We would do anything from going to schools and handing out soccer balls to finding intel.”
The mismatch between that work and the TV version has been building for years. A 2008 documentary titled Lioness looked at the real team and the PTSD many members faced after returning home from Iraq, and Daria Sommers and Meg McLagan later made a 12-episode podcast, The Lioness Origin Story, to dig further into the same history. Sommers said she was not criticizing Nicole Kidman or Zoe Saldaña, but argued that if Sheridan had called the show something else, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
That is the unresolved problem now. The television series may keep growing as a franchise, but the women it borrows from are making clear that fame is not the same as accuracy. Until Sheridan or Paramount+ answers why the Team Lioness name was used for a spy story that so many of the real participants say erases their mission, the argument over who owns that history is not going away.
