My dad was a World War II buff, and since war movies were never my thing, I spent a good part of my childhood watching them anyway. That’s how it goes when you’re a kid and your father settles in on a Saturday afternoon with something on the television. The Longest Day. Battle of the Bulge. Twelve O’Clock High. Patton more times than I can count. I would rather have been almost anywhere else, but I sat there because he was my dad and because that was where he was.
He fought in Korea. His own father fought in the First World War. So the man watching Hollywood’s version of combat next to me had about as direct a line to the real thing as a person can have, and here is what I remember about his commentary: none. He never turned to me to say that a real officer wouldn’t behave that way, or that the Army didn’t work like that, or that some actor was insulting the men who had actually been there. He watched the movies and he liked the movies. By the time I was ten I understood that what we were seeing was a story invented by people in California, and I understood it because he did.
I’ve been thinking about him this week, because a great many grown men on the internet have decided that a television show is lying to them, and they cannot do the thing my father did without any effort at all.
Here’s what happened. On August 11 an account based in Ghana posted a clip from Lioness, the Paramount+ series starring Zoe Saldaña. In it, Saldaña’s character and an Army captain played by Genesis Rodriguez scream at each other on a forward operating base in Iraq. The clip traveled the way clips do, and within a day or two the professional grievance accounts had it, chief among them Will Jordan, the Scottish YouTuber who performs online as The Critical Drinker.
“Why do these writers think screaming at each other in front of their own men is how officers exert their authority?” he asked his two and a half million subscribers in an X thread with over 2,000 replies and 1,600 shares. “They would be relieved of duty on the grounds of mental instability for acting like this.”
There is a great deal wrong with that, and we’re going to take our time.
Start with the calendar. The scene is from season two, episode two, which aired on October 27, 2024. It isn’t new, it isn’t from the current season, and it wasn’t controversial when it came out. The coverage at the time treated it as the best work Saldaña had done on the show, a showstopper in an episode full of them. Nobody wrote a word about command climate or officer conduct. The scene sat quietly for almost twenty-two months until an account with no stake in American military culture reposted it, because shouting performs well.
Meanwhile season three of Lioness is airing right now, weekly, and episode two dropped on August 9, two days before the repost. So the men who have appointed themselves the authorities on this show are furious about a scene from a season and a half ago while the actual current season goes out unwatched. Nobody in this cycle saw the episode. Nobody knew what season it came from.
Then there’s “these writers.” Lioness has one writer. Taylor Sheridan wrote that episode, directed that episode, and turns up in that same season as an actor. Sheridan is the man MAGA has spent five years holding up as the last honest storyteller in Hollywood, the guy who supposedly makes television for real Americans instead of coastal scolds. The episode is titled “I Love My Country.” A crowd that has built an entire identity around Yellowstone spent this week attacking Taylor Sheridan’s writing without ever working out that it was his.
Now the substance, such as it is. Two officers screaming at each other in front of enlisted personnel is not an invention of the woke writers’ room. It’s one of the oldest scenes in the genre. In A Few Good Men, a Navy lawyer breaks a Marine colonel on the witness stand and the colonel comes apart in open court with the whole room watching. Patton opens with George C. Scott delivering a profanity-soaked address to an army, and the film’s most famous sequence has him slapping a hospitalized soldier in front of a ward full of wounded men. Barnes and Elias spend the length of Platoon at each other’s throats where every enlisted man can hear it. Captain Sobel screams his way through the first hour of Band of Brothers until the sergeants under him turn in their stripes in protest. MASH ran eleven seasons on insubordination played for laughs. Every one of those performances was celebrated, and George C. Scott won the Academy Award for his.
Sheridan wrote men behaving exactly this way in season one of this same show and across the rest of his television empire, and none of it produced a wave of concern about emotional regulation among commissioned officers. Forty years of men yelling in uniform on American screens, and the objection arrived the week chuds discovered the officers were (military drumroll) two women!
But the real control group is sitting right there in Sheridan’s own filing cabinet. He already wrote a woman who screams at men, and this exact audience worships her. Beth Dutton insults her father’s business rivals to their faces, brawls with her own brother in a barn, and spends five seasons announcing her intention to destroy him. Kelly Reilly gets stopped in airports by fans hoping she’ll be cruel to them. Nobody has ever called Beth Dutton a “girlboss” – a word these types use to describe a female leader – or filed a complaint about her mental fitness. The difference is what her rage is for. Beth’s power runs through her father and his ranch, and she spends every drop of it defending a family legacy that belongs to a man. Joe McNamara’s power is her own, handed to her by an institution, and she spends it on men who don’t outrank her. One of those women is permitted and the other isn’t, and the volume was never the issue.
The medical diagnosis deserves a second look too. Relieved of duty for mental instability is a serious claim, and one of Critical Drinker’s followers turned up in the replies to shore it up with a statute, Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, conduct unbecoming an officer. That’s where the whole thing comes apart. Article 133 applies to commissioned officers of the armed forces. Joe McNamara is a CIA officer, a civilian, running an intelligence program alongside the Army rather than inside it. No article of the UCMJ reaches her, because she was never under it to begin with. The only person in that scene the statute could touch is Rodriguez’s Army captain, who minutes earlier had flown in and pulled Saldaña’s team out of an ambush. The friction in the scene is about precisely that gap in authority, which is the entire reason Saldaña’s character has to assert herself the way she does. Anyone actually concerned with military accuracy would have caught this in about four seconds. The conclusion came first and the reasoning got bolted on afterward.
If you want to know what the reasoning is a costume for, read the replies.
One respondent, explaining that the objection here is a professional one, wrote that this kind of work requires “quiet professionals” with “no cowboys or wild men,” and then finished the thought: “no vaginas.” That took two words, and it’s the only honest sentence in the entire discourse.
It’s worth stopping on that word “girlboss,” since it’s carrying most of the freight. There is no male version of it. A man who raises his voice at a subordinate is forceful, and if he’s played by Gene Hackman he’s a legend, and if he’s played by George C. Scott he’s an American icon with a statuette he refused to accept. Girlboss names exactly one offense, which is a woman visibly holding authority. The word does no work at all as a criticism of writing or performance, and it isn’t meant to.
The rest of the vocabulary tells on itself just as fast. One reply calls the “Boss Bitch routine” exhausting. Another explains that the way bad writers fake toughness is to have characters “yell like bitches” and drop the f-bomb every other word. Exhausting is an aesthetic complaint. It tells you a man is tired of looking at something, which is a perfectly ordinary thing to feel and an entirely different thing from a concern about the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Another explained that everyone in the thread is either military or the family of military, and that the armed forces stayed conservative until they morphed into a jobs program over the past twenty years. The draft ended in 1973. Every American who has served since then volunteered, and the GI Bill has been the recruiting pitch since 1944. Fifty years of paying people to enlist is not a recent development.
My favorite came from a man complaining about an entirely different episode. He described the scene where Rodriguez’s helicopter pilot gets shot down and an infantry unit has to go in and pull her out, and he offered it as proof the show is girlboss fantasy. Note how he identified her. Not as a captain, not as an Apache pilot with four tours in Afghanistan, but as “the tough as nails lesbian helicopter pilot.” Whether an Apache can be shot down over Iran has nothing whatsoever to do with who she sleeps with, and he put it in anyway, because it belongs on the actual list of things he’s objecting to.
And the episode he’s angry about is the season two finale, which aired on December 8, 2024, six weeks after the one everybody else is mad about. Look at what it depicts: a woman going down and men risking their lives to bring her home. That is the exact consequence these guys insist Hollywood is too cowardly to show. Sheridan showed it, and the man is furious anyway. There is no version of that scene that would have satisfied him, which tells you the scene was never the problem.
Another decided Saldaña won’t take a role unless she gets to scream. Seriously, someone said that. Yet in March of 2025, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress playing a lawyer in Emilia Pérez, after taking the Golden Globe and the SAG for the same performance. She’s the first American of Dominican origin to win an Oscar. To believe she can only do one thing, you have to have skipped the thing she won for.
As for the man leading the charge, Will Jordan – the Critical Drinker – is from Fife. He took an honours degree in information technology and worked in web design for a satellite broadcaster before he started filming himself with a whisky. He has never served in any military, ours or Britain’s. He built his channel on a recurring segment called Get Woke Go Broke, a bankrupt bumper-sticker slogan, which requires a fresh outrage on a schedule, which is why a twenty-two-month-old clip qualifies as news on a Thursday.
He did try making something once. In 2022 he ran a Kickstarter for a short film based on his own spy novels and asked for £20,000. His audience gave him £303,339. He expanded the project, hired a professional crew, and released it in 2024, and it sits at 3.8 on IMDb, with some of the harshest reviews written by the backers who funded it. One of them pointed out that the faults Jordan had spent years cataloguing in other people’s movies turned up in his own. The plot involves recovering a CIA asset from a fortified base.
Even the machines have this one figured out. X generates its own summaries of what a given fight is about, and its summary of this one never mentions officer conduct or military regulation. It says the clip is fueling debate about portrayals of female authority, and that the critical vocabulary in play is girlboss and cringe. When the neutral algorithm reading over everyone’s shoulder identifies your argument as being about women in charge, the concern for realism is a jacket you’ve thrown on over it.
The last movie I ever saw with my father was Crimson Tide. It came out in May of 1995 and he died that same month. We sat there together and watched Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington scream in each other’s faces on the conn of a nuclear missile submarine with the entire crew standing right there, and then relieve each other of command, one after the other, in the middle of a launch order. A man who had worn the uniform, whose own father had worn it before him, had a wonderful time. It never once occurred to him that either of those officers would have been walked off that boat by a psychiatrist. He knew a movie when he saw one.
I never did learn his politics. He kept them to himself the way a lot of men of that generation did. But near the end, while the Republicans were going after Bill Clinton over a land deal in Arkansas and our congressman was on television about it every other night, he said the only political thing I ever heard out of him about anybody: “He thinks he’s a little Hitler.”
He could sit through forty years of Hollywood dramatizing war and never once mistake it for an attack on himself. Then he looked at Newt Gingrich, the man who represented him in Congress, and saw straight through him. That’s the whole skill, and my dad had it without trying. But a woman who doesn’t exist raises her voice on a base that doesn’t exist and chuds call it a threat to the American military. The actual thing my father warned me about has been on television for thirty years now, and they keep voting for it.
I would give anything to be back there again or him here with me. I think I know what he’d think of these MAGA snowflakes. He would not have been kind.
Add Comment