The ‘Yellowstone’ creator’s latest drama is about an elite CIA operation to infiltrate a group of terrorists by befriending their wives and daughters.
There’s a moment late in Barbie when a character lays out all the contradictory demands placed on women: to be strong but not too strong, pretty but not too vain, ambitious but never aggressive, and on and on and on. It’s an inconceivable standard for anyone to meet, even a perky toy doll, and the film’s conclusion is that the only way to live with them is by letting go of the pressure to try.
But the thing about cultural scripts is that they’re damnably hard to shake. There are always going to be people trying to thread that needle, no matter how clearly impossible it is. And so we get stuff like Paramount+’s Special Ops: Lioness, a series that tries so hard to meet some broadly palatable ideal that it largely forgets to do anything interesting.