The first season of Showtime’s Yellowjackets was a near-instant hit, gathering the most viewers for a show’s first season on the platform since Billions in 2016. The show has a captivating premise: a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team (the titular Yellowjackets) are on their way to compete in Nationals in 1996 when their plane crashes, leaving them stranded in the Canadian wilderness for nineteen months. Alongside this storyline, we also follow some of the survivors, now grown women in the present, dealing with the guilt and trauma of what happened in their own ways. Though what exactly happened in those woods is a driving mystery (cannibalism was alluded to in the pilot), that’s not the only thing that keeps the audience hooked. The surviving adults (at least, those we are aware of), Shauna (Melanie Lynsky), Misty (Christina Ricci), Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) are brought together again because of mysterious postcards they receive—postcards which allude to their time in the wilderness.
The dual timeline structure is a service to Yellowjackets, allowing the show to attract both younger and older audiences. Yellowjackets captures, in a way rarely seen on our television screens, the brutality and ruthlessness that teenage girls are capable of without shying away from any of the (literally) gory details. The friendship between Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) and Jackie (Ella Purnell) is the central relationship we focus on in the 1996 timeline.Wonderfully complex and flawed, it’s full of love and jealousy in equal parts. I’m sure many people relate to having had a similarly codependent but toxic relationship with their best friend in their youth. For the Yellowjackets, however, typical teenage drama comes with life-or-death consequences. Watching the characters struggle to balance their survival with interpersonal drama is one of the key difficulties and tragedies of the show.
The show easily flows between genres, never quite settling, at least so far, on just what it is. It remains unclear if there is something supernatural going on in the woods or if the strange happenings are just a result of the delirium that comes from a mixture of hunger, untreated mental illness and the desire to make sense of an indifferent environment. Though the mystery and horror were certainly a draw to me, what kept me watching was the characters and their relationships. I truly care for every one of the characters in both their 1996 and their 2021 incarnations. Taissa and Van’s relationship, rendered lovingly by queer actors Jasmin Savoy Brown and Liv Hewson, is one of the sweetest parts of the show, providing some much-needed lightness amidst the gore.
If you are a fan of well-rounded and messy female characters who are allowed to age and make mistakes, Yellowjackets is a must-watch. It’s the best new show to be released in a while, and after its first season’s rousing success, I’m so excited to see what lies in store for not only the (already-confirmed!) second season but hopefully many more seasons to come.