Taylor Sheridan’s 24-Episode Action Thriller Officially Confirms A Genre Change

Published Oct 8, 2026, 8:30 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

The success of Taylor Sheridan’s three-season spy series on Paramount proves that the genre has made a full-time move to the small screen, for better or worse. When No Time To Die was announced as Daniel Craig’s final movie and its repeated release date delays pushed off the spy sequel’s arrival, plenty of fans had time to guess that the movie would do the unthinkable and actually kill off James Bond.

However, even though the other Craig James Bond movies had built up to this twist, the 007 franchise has still struggled to recover from No Time To Die’s ending. There is still just under two years before this will be the longest gap between James Bond movies ever, but the franchise isn’t exactly rocketing forward in the meant time. No Time To Die’s 007 Death fundamentally reshaped the series, and the years since have proven that another format is more fitting for spy stories.

As the James Bond movies struggle with questions like whether the next movie should ignore the existence of Craig’s 007 or become an MCU-style franchise, with a consistent canon and recurring characters, shows like Taylor Sheridan’s three-season hit Lioness are busy proving that spy stories now make more sense on the small screen. Debuting in 2023, Sheridan’s SEAL Team replacement focuses on Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara, a CIA agent who runs the titular Lioness program.

Lioness’s Season 3 Success Proves Spy Shows Rule The 2020s

Via MovieStillsDB

The titular Lioness program tasks female operatives with getting close to the intimate partners of terrorists, criminal financiers, and gang leaders to help collect intel. Lioness’s incredible season 3 premiere performance, with a multi-platform audience share of over 7 million viewers in one week, is the latest confirmation that spy shows are unstoppable on streaming in the 2020s. However, viewers don’t need to go too far to find more evidence of this trend.

Slow Horses, Netflix’s The Night Agent, The Agency, Ponies, Black Doves, The Copenhagen Test, The Asset, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and even the Citadel franchise all prove that the spy has officially gone small screen. Lioness’s phenomenal cast alone proves that spy shows are bigger than spy movies, even though The Americans had arguably already hinted at this during its critically acclaimed run.

Lioness attracted the likes of Nicole Kidman, Saldaña, and Morgan Freeman, proving that spy TV is A-list worthy. In contrast, the high profile spy movies of the last five years, such as Argyle, Black Bag, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and even the most recent Mission: Impossible, all underperformed at the box office and with critics, further cementing this industry trend.

Why Spy Shows Make More Sense Than Spy Movies In The 2020s

Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb

Even Charlie Hunnam and Matthew MacFayden's upcoming John le Carré adaptation is opting for a miniseries format, eschewing the traditional movie approach taken by most of the author’s earlier adaptations. While this industry-wide shift might seem like a dramatic change for a genre that has been consistently popular since the end of the Second World War, it is surprisingly easy to see why this shift in viewing habits has come about.

As proven by Lioness’s focus on Joe and Cruz’s PTSD, viewers are invested in longer form, more grounded spy stories about the psychological results of espionage, its impacts on families, and the broader ethics of the work. For all of the silliness of Sheridan’s shows, Lioness is far from a flashy, spectacle-driven blockbuster with lone wolf protagonists, like the James Bond movies and their imitators that once defined the genre.

As such, the show’s outsized success proves that viewers aren’t as interested in hyper-competent secret agents saving the day as they may have been a few decades ago. Instead, the spy story is now a darker, more personal one, and Lioness’s success highlights the ways that longer form storytelling facilities this tonal shift in a single series.