Taylor Sheridan's Foreign Policy and the Anti-Interventionism of ...

The second season finale of Lioness mirrored the first: light on plot, heavy on action. Taylor Sheridan even wrote himself into the script to save the day (as he also did in this week’s episode of Yellowstone). In a classic war movie trope, he held off scores of Iranian redshirts almost singlehandedly until a helicopter arrived, flying in from miles away to mow down the enemy just when all seemed lost.

Beneath the bullets, bloodshed, and spectacle, it’s fascinating—at least to me—to unravel what might be called the “Taylor Sheridan foreign policy,” the worldview of a television writer often linked to Red-State America, despite Sheridan’s own unease with the President-elect. His politics in Lioness—much like in Yellowstone—refuse to align neatly with any party. He’s clearly anti-woke (most evident in Tulsa King), yet also staunchly anti-corporate. Sheridan has said he prefers to let his shows speak for themselves, but there are a lot of almost contradictions: he respects oil drillers but despises the corporations that profit from them; he reveres ranchers but scorns corporate agriculture.

Sheridan’s work also reveals a deep distrust of government institutions alongside a profound respect for the military—even as he frequently critiques the futility of its missions. In Lioness, he centers the story on a shadowy deep-state program operating beyond the President’s control—a program Sheridan himself likely views with skepticism. And rightly so—it’s the kind of covert, morally ambiguous you-need-me-on-that-wall operation that claims to defend American interests while simultaneously undermining American ideals.

He has a deep reverence for his characters—patriotic grunts who, despite their skepticism, follow orders to their own detriment because of their unwavering love for their country. They embody a complex loyalty: a readiness to carry out commands even as they harbor a distrust for the motives behind them. Casting Max Martini as one of these grunts feels like an intentional nod to David Mamet’s The Unit, a show that similarly explored the lives of soldiers bound by duty yet quietly questioning the larger machine they serve.

The politics of Lioness, like the show itself, is messy, but there’s a distinct throughline — one that ties its sprawling action and occasional lapses into melodrama into a singular, pointed critique. In fact, the entire first season — preposterous shootouts and cringey, Sorkin-esque dialogue included — seems written to deliver one pivotal exchange in the finale:

“What you did,” Joe shoots back, “was eliminate one of the worst perpetrators of violence in the past 20 years.”
“Says you!”
“Says f**king history! And you just changed it.”
“All I changed was oil prices,” Cruz scowls. “I’ll tell you what we just did,” she adds. “Some day, Aaliyah’s gonna have kids, and those kids are going to hear about how their grandfather died, and all we did is make the next generation of terrorists.”

The scene reverberates with echoes of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy — a war on terror that largely paved the way for new cycles of violence. But there are also shades of Vietnam in the disillusionment Sheridan captures, especially in Michael Kelly’s character in the second season finale after a supposedly triumphant mission to eliminate the head of a drug cartel. Nicole Kidman’s character commends him with bittersweet reassurance while he’s puking up his guts. “Easy to forget how ugly this keeping the peace can be,” she says, misreading his reaction. He’s not recoiling from the violence itself but from its futility.

“What makes me sick is how little will change,” he replies—a statement that encapsulates Sheridan’s worldview. The victories in Lioness are Pyrrhic, their fleeting triumphs overshadowed by the bleak reality that the systems enabling them are designed to sustain, not resolve, conflict. It’s a sobering critique of interventionist policies, one that confronts the human cost while questioning whether the ends can ever justify the means. While the show is undeniably flawed — and, at times, outright bad — Sheridan’s anti-interventionist messaging cuts across ideological lines, resonating as much with MAGA supporters as it might with progressives like AOC.