Lioness Season 3 Is Why Taylor Sheridan Shows Are Becoming Hard To Watch

Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for Lioness season 3, episode 2.As good as Lioness season 3 has been so far, it's also the perfect example of why Taylor Sheridan's shows are becoming difficult to watch lately. Taylor Sheridan has undoubtedly been on a hot streak lately. Sheridan's shows on Paramount+ routinely top the streaming service's viewership leader boards, they often receive rave reviews from critics, and Lioness season 3 has already gotten great reviews and widespread popularity.

For all the success Taylor Sheridan has enjoyed, however, his shows are also becoming more difficult to watch. Several of Sheridan's recent shows have been the subject of criticism and controversy, from Landman's plotline for Ainsley to the divisive ending of 1923. Now, the most recent episode of Lioness season 3 has also made a very controversial decision, but this most recent choice exposes why Sheridan's shows feel different than they used to.

Lioness Season 3, Episode 2's Torture Scene Was Unnecessarily Graphic

The opening scene of Lioness season 3, episode 2 follows Joe (Zoe Saldaña) in the present day after she was kidnapped by Russian agents in the season premiere. In this episode, the Russians start searching for a tracking device embedded in Joe's skin, and when she refuses to tell them where it is, they strip her naked to search. Shockingly little is left to the imagination as Joe's abductors run their hands down her naked body, into her mouth, and, it's heavily implied but mercifully not shown, into her vagina to search for the locator.

Just as the Russians are about to start cutting off body parts, Joe breaks and tells them where the tracker is. The audience is rewarded with getting to watch as the kidnappers slice into Joe's toe as she screams in pain. Lioness season 3, episode 2 has over three uninterrupted minutes of torture and sexual assault right at the start of the episode, and it was unnecessarily graphic and visceral.

Torture and rape scenes often have a legitimate reason to happen. They highlight character traits audiences wouldn't otherwise see by putting characters through one of the most stressful and frightening experiences out there. Lioness' torture scene does all that: it proves that Joe is exceptionally cool under even the most brutal pressure, that it takes an extraordinary amount of abuse to get her to break, and that her kidnappers are disgusting and evil villains, all while serving as a parallel to episode 1, when Cody and his team abused the Russian agent they captured.

The problem with Lioness' torture scene is that it didn't need to be that graphic and disturbing to get any of those points across. Saldaña didn't need to be fully naked for the scene, audiences didn't need a close-up of the knife slicing into her foot, and there didn't need to be a prolonged take of Joe reaction to being sexually assaulted. There was a much more tasteful and less grotesque way to go about this torture scene, one that showed Joe's willpower and the Russians' villainy without having to showcase every gory detail.

Taylor Sheridan Loves Torture Scenes, But They Don't Add Much To His Shows

Lioness season 3's torture scene is nothing new for Taylor Sheridan, and that's the problem. Sheridan loves to include torture or rape scenes in his shows. Yellowstone had Beth beaten within an inch of her life on several occasions, 1883 killed Elsa in gruesome fashion, Landman saw Tommy tortured with a nail in his thigh, Tulsa King had Dwight do the torturing, and more. This isn't even the first time Lioness has had a graphic depiction of torture before, as Cruz suffered an "enhanced interrogation" in season 1 as training for the program.

By far the worst offender within Sheridan's oeuvre is the Yellowstone prequel series 1923. In that show, Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) routinely tortures and abuses a pair of prostitutes until one becomes a dominatrix and the other ends up dead in a ditch. 1923 devotes dozens of minutes across multiple seasons to showing the prostitutes whip and rape each other in horrifying detail. Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) also gets sexually assaulted on a train before dying a gnarly death at the hands of frostbite.

There are only a handful of shows that don't include torture or rape in some capacity, and the most prominent one is The Madison. That's only because its story, about a grieving widow and her family learning to appreciate the countryside while processing their grief, didn't give him an opportunity to include it. The Madison does still find a way to brutalize women, however, as Paige (Elle Chapman) gets punched in the face and robbed in the show's opening minutes.

Sheridan's shows are so difficult to watch these days because of these many instances of over-the-top violence and sexual assault. These scenes are obviously meant to be uncomfortable, but Sheridan — or someone else on the creative team — is taking them too far. People tune into Lioness to see military action, tense family drama, and a twisty political spy thriller, not to watch the main character be subjected to inhuman abuses in the most depraved way possible.

In the past, Sheridan's more gruesome scenes were assumed to be a product of the genre he loves most: revisionist and neo-Westerns. Highlighting these vile acts of violence was a way to show the depravity hidden by the myth of the Old West and emphasize his shows' commitment to gritty realism. There comes a point, however, when "gritty realism" is no longer enough to justify depicting torture and sexual assault on camera in the vast majority of shows.

The character development and tension that torture and rape scenes can and do give to Sheridan's shows no longer justify the visceral way they are depicted. Sheridan's most recent torture scenes are more uncomfortable and disturbing than they're worth, especially when there's a way to accomplish the exact same goal in a less demeaning and vulgar way.

Sheridan Already Nailed A Torture Scene In Sicario, But He's Gone Downhill Since

The most frustrating part of Taylor Sheridan's recent penchant for including torture and rape scenes in his work is that he's gotten worse at it over time. Sheridan's first professional writing credit was for Sicario in 2015, and that film has one of the best examples of how to include a meaningful but not unnecessarily cruel torture scene in general. In it, Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) approaches a cartel member with a jug of water, stands uncomfortably close to him, and the camera moves away to look at a drain as the torture commences.

Sicario's torture scene is a textbook example of how to do a torture scene without sliding into spectacle and graphic violence. Sicario doesn't show a drop of water being poured, either for waterboarding or for something worse, yet it still makes viewers uncomfortable. In fact, not showing the water being poured is actually more effective. It lets viewers try to imagine what is happening, what Alejandro is doing, and it lets the audience's imagination fill in all the gruesome details.

On top of its effectiveness as an unnerving moment, Sicario's torture scene also works as a great character moment. It tells you everything you need to know about how Alejandro works behind closed doors, it gives viewers a glimpse at the rapport he has with Graver (Josh Brolin), and it builds a sense of unease and disquiet that the rest of the movie only continues to escalate. Sicario does everything Lioness wanted to do, and it did it without having to show audiences a close-up of graphic sexual assault.

Sicario was directed by Denis Villeneuve, while Lioness season 3, episode 2 was directed by Michael Friedman, which may account for the difference in how their torture scenes played out. Still, Sheridan wrote both scenes. For some reason, his approach to torture scenes has gotten worse in the past 11 years. Maybe it's because he's become more successful and no one wants to reel in his indulgences anymore. Maybe it's because he switched from broadcast to streaming, and censorship is less of a factor. Maybe he's just trying to fill the runtime of a season of television, but Lioness' torture scene is just the most recent example of this problem.