Yellowjackets
A teenage girl runs through the snowy forest in the low light of dawn. She’s wearing pajamas and she’s barefoot. As she runs, she passes crude carvings of eyes on the trees around her, and makeshift effigies made of twigs and hair. Drawing ever closer are animalistic noises that sound as much like forest creatures as they do the sounds of humans who’ve lost touch with civilization. The running girl stops, overcome by fear, and begins to cry. The sounds draw closer, so she runs again this time only making it a few feet before falling into a pit full of sharpened sapling trunks. The camera moves in close to reveal that she’s been impaled in six different places. A figure wearing animal pelts to fend off the winter cold approaches the trap and looks down at its prey. The figure wears pink Converse All-Stars.
So begins Showtime’s Yellowjackets, a series that came out of absolutely nowhere in November of 2021 and bowled me over with its storytelling, its incredibly rendered characters, and its performances across its large cast. Now with the 2nd season of this dramatic horror/mystery series about to hit at the end of March I thought I would write a bit about the show’s first season in the hope that I can get a few more Yellowjackets fans excited at the prospect of having an excellent week to week series to watch!
The title of the series refers to the name of many of the main character's high school soccer team in 1996. The premiere, expertly directed by Karyn Kusama (The Invitation), introduces us to the major players on the Yellowjackets while also cutting back and forth in time between their teen years and today. Through well designed flashbacks we learn that that opening sequence I described takes place at some point during 1996. The hunted girl was a member of the Yellowjackets. The hunter, one of her teammates.
On their way to a national competition, the Yellowjackets get in a horrible plane crash. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, they struggle to survive, and we watch as a hierarchy develops between the survivors a la Lord of the Flies. Yellowjackets primarily alternates between the weeks after the crash and a series of events that unfold 25 years later, threatening to expose the truth of what happened in the Canadian wilderness. Some of the girls made it home, but they have been receiving postcards about the secrets they’ve kept about how exactly they survived their ordeal. Is someone blackmailing them? Why? And what exactly do they know?
One of the strengths of the writing here is how distinctly the writers and performers sketch the characters, both as teenagers and adults. If there’s a lead, it’s probably Melanie Lynskey/Sophie Nélisse as Shauna Sheridan, who seems like the quiet girl on the team but takes a big secret into the crash with her. As the adult Shauna, the always reliable Lynskey perfectly captures a kind of reckless trauma, the way that survivors of the unimaginable often take greater risks and look at the world a little differently—and Nélisse deftly echoes the adult Shauna without ever feeling like she’s impersonating Lynskey. Her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell) never came home, and Shauna knows some things about why she will never be able to confess.
If Shauna’s trauma has turned into recklessness, Natalie’s has become white-hot rage. Passionately played by Juliette Lewis as an adult and Sophie Thatcher, also great, as a teen, Natalie is ready to close some of the loops on what happened a quarter-century ago. She reconnects with Misty (Christina Ricci/Sammi Hanratty), the girl who seemed the most harmless on the plane but one who may in actuality be a sociopath, then and especially now. Ricci nails the kind of unsettling smile that hides a deeply disturbed mind. Finally, there’s the truly troubled Taissa (Tawny Cypress/Jasmin Savoy Brown), who seems to have it all—a wife, son, and even a campaign for State Senate—but is deeply haunted by what happened to her, even if she's spent much of her life trying to bury it.
There’s a fascinating tonal balance in Yellowjackets in that the wilderness scenes play out like a slow-motion car crash. Because of what is revealed in the premiere, we know things are going to get very bad. So, seeing the girls talk about rescue, hunt for food, and even have moments of happiness have the air of a slow-burn horror movie. At the same time, the writing develops the characters in present day with depth, even playing out like a traditional drama at times such as when Shauna meets a man who tempts her with potential infidelity or Taissa struggles with raising her son. The writing very smartly doesn’t draw direct lines from the teen years to the adult ones—there’s a much worse version of this show that does that very bluntly—and yet we come to see the characters both teen and middle aged as one.
The cohesive nature of Yellowjackets wouldn’t exist without a truly great ensemble, and what I admire most about the show is how much there’s not a single weak link here and plenty of standouts—every time I thought one performer like Lynskey, Lewis, or Thatcher would start to steal it, I was impressed by another actress. It’s also a wickedly funny show, both literally such as when a girl laments that a dead teammate won't get to hear Oasis’ "Wonderwall" again and in production choices. I laughed out loud when they played Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song” over a flashback of the plane crashing into, well, a mountain.
Teen dramas are typically about those years in which we figure out who we are. Yellowjackets is a show where that phase of life takes place in the most extreme conditions imaginable. What kind of adults emerge from that crucible? There are clear influences on display from Lord of the Flies to LOST, but I found the way it shapes its many genres into something resonant refreshing. Kusama expertly sets the stage with the vicious premiere and then every episode after that builds on it with none of the bloat or wheel-spinning so common to prestige TV. I can’t wait for the second season to begin!
