Credits: LucaFazPhoto (Luca Fazzolari) — WikiPortraits at 2025 Venice Film Festival / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.
On February 5, 2026, Netflix releases Les Lionnes, a French series in 8 episodes. This series combines bank robbery and social mirror, making it unmissable among french tv shows netflix. Also, it is to be followed on Netflix in 2026. In a southern suburb, five women facing female precarity decide to attempt a first bold score. Dressed as men, they discover that a heist can look like a way out. Humor, excess, and the pace of the story carry a simple question: what remains when the system leaves you on the edge — if not female solidarity, or flight?
Les Lionnes, A Pop Crime Drama That Refuses Naturalism
You can enter Les Lionnes like slamming a car door: with noise, momentum, the promise of a getaway. The series assumes a hybrid tone: French crime comedy, a robbery series with a nervous tempo and social chronicle rub together without asking permission. It’s not a case file, nor a reconstruction. It’s a contemporary fable, aimed at adrenaline.
The setup is familiar and, here, claimed: a team forms, a plan takes shape, the outside world tightens. Except the crew is far from a romantic gang. They look like a group of friends counting coins and knowing the shame of hard month-ends. They find themselves inventing violence for lack of being heard.
This choice — energy over realism — guides all staging. Action sequences are edited like heart accelerations. Farce appears unexpectedly, then emotion follows, raw, like a forgotten bill. In that split, the series bets on a risky balance: make you laugh without excusing, move you without sanctifying.
Five Heroines, Five Fractures: An Ensemble Cast Front and Center
They are the engine. Rebecca Marder plays Rosalie, a nervous pivot, sometimes makeshift leader, sometimes child of doubt. Zoé Marchal plays Kim, impulsive, dangerously free, always ready to set the plan — and sometimes the team — on fire. Naidra Ayadi portrays Sofia, more inward, who holds the line when everything trembles. Tya Deslauriers is Alex, the calculating eye, the body that absorbs. Pascale Arbillot plays Chloé, a woman thought settled, who discovers late that you can still reinvent yourself — even on the brink.
The story presents them as highly typed profiles, in the sense that each carries a clear tension: money urgency, social humiliation, contained anger, need for belonging. But the series avoids reducing them to a slogan. Precarity is not a backdrop. It is constant pressure: it eats away, isolates, pushes to ‘do something’ — even if that something is madness.
Around them, supporting roles are drawn larger, sometimes into caricature. It’s a deliberate choice: in a world that crushes, the powerful also wear masks, but with more expensive costumes. The series toys with those masks, even if it skirts satire.
Where the Roar Comes From: The Gang des Amazones Case, in Counterpoint
Les Lionnes is loosely inspired by a news story: that of the Gang des Amazones (the “Gang des Amazones”), active between 1989 and 1990 in the Vaucluse, around Avignon. In the real story, five young women, childhood friends (including two sisters), carried out several bold robberies. They disguised themselves as men with wigs and fake mustaches, targeting local bank branches. The motive, told over years by various accounts and documentaries, is less about glamorous banditry than survival: odd jobs, poverty, children to feed, and the feeling of being trapped.
The series, however, moves the material. It projects it to 2026, gives it brighter colors, more grotesque antagonists, and an action-series tempo. It does not try to stick to chronology or legal details. It borrows an idea — ‘invisible women become visible robbers’ — and turns it into a pop story.
That freedom has an advantage: it allows speaking about the present without the documentary alibi. But it carries a risk: the news story, blasted apart, can become mere narrative fuel. Les Lionnes walks that line. It often gets by by reminding, behind the masks, what motivates the act: the shadow of humiliations, the fatigue of closed doors, the rage of counting for nothing.
A ‘Music Video’ Direction: Speed, Colors, Excess
Director Olivier Rosemberg opts for nervousness. Short shots, music as a motor, snappy dialogue: you feel the will to run the story at high revs. The series alternates between heist tension and offbeat comedy, creating a gripping balance. Thus, every burst of laughter seems to keep the drama from settling in too comfortably.
This pop aesthetic can disconcert. It makes some moments joyful, almost insolent. It can also, at times, speed up to the point of skimming what it touches. When everything moves fast, there’s less room for silence. And precarity is often a story of silences.
At its best, the series uses this frenzy to speak to the era: a world saturated with images, slogans, communications, where violence itself becomes a language. The heroines learn to play a role — men — to enter a room that was forbidden to them. And that disguise, far from being a mere trick, becomes a metaphor: you must dress as something else to be taken seriously.
Jonathan Cohen, Producer and Actor: Comedy as an Ambivalent Weapon
Jonathan Cohen appears here in two capacities: producer and actor. His presence is significant, signaling continuity with a recent, more unselfconscious French fiction. Indeed, this fiction is ready to mix the burlesque and the dark. After the era of ensemble comedies on platforms, Les Lionnes takes a step aside: the joke is no longer just entertainment, it becomes a survival strategy.
The series plays with that ambiguity. It uses figures of power sometimes grotesque — banker, local politician, neighborhood boss — and pushes them toward farce. Laughter then serves to deflate arrogance. But laughter can also anesthetize. That’s the project’s central paradox: make violence ‘watchable’ without making it light.
On that point, Les Lionnes doesn’t always pick a side. It prefers the gray zone. It shows the euphoria of the first score, the sensation of regaining control, then lets the price come: fear, paranoia, the erosion of bonds. You don’t rob a bank without robbing something inside yourself.
What the Series Says About Female Precarity, And What It Leaves In The Shadows
The precarity told here isn’t theoretical. It comes through details: an empty fridge, an administrative procedure that becomes a trap, a debt that sticks to the skin, a commonplace humiliation. The series also insists on an idea rarely shown without pitying tone: precarity isolates. It cuts off loved ones, eats away self-esteem, makes you ashamed.
The strength of the story lies in the female solidarity it stages, an imperfect sisterhood, often bruised, always threatened. The heroines are not saints. They make mistakes, lie, hurt each other. But they share something: they’ve understood you don’t get out alone.
There remains a blind spot: by charging ahead, the series sometimes evokes more than it explores. Institutions — police, justice, politics — mostly exist as pursuing forces, or machines of cynicism. That fits the heist genre. But it can simplify complex questions, as if the world were split between hunters and hunted.
A Dotted Ending: Suspense, Consequences, And The Question Of Season 2
Without revealing final turns, the season ends on an open ending. It doesn’t neatly close fates. It leaves a feeling of suspension: a group, choices, and what remains to be paid. This ellipsis naturally fuels the question of a follow-up.
At this stage, Netflix has not officially announced a season 2. The format would lend itself: the consequences of a first string of robberies, the flight, intimate fractures, the return of more structured threats. But the series can also be read as a single block: a rise, a vertigo, and the shadow falling back.
A Less Inhibited French Fiction, But Not Without Ambiguities
Les Lionnes reads like a symptom. Of a contemporary French fiction that finally accepts mixing genres: social in the crime drama, burlesque in the tragedy, satire in the thriller. That freedom feels good: it avoids solemnity, allows talking about power relations without a lecturing tone.
But it also requires vigilance: with so much pop, one can ‘stylize’ misery. The series gets by by sometimes keeping an attentive eye on what’s at stake behind the action: ordinary injustice, social assignment, and the temptation of violence when everything else has failed.
At heart, the title is apt. A lioness is not only a warrior. She’s also a survivor. In Les Lionnes, the heroines roar because they no longer have a voice. And if the series amuses, shocks, and hooks, it may be because it recalls a simple truth: when lives are pushed to the edge for too long, the edge eventually answers.
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