The Case For: ‘Yellowjackets’ & How The Show Unspools Its Mystery with Confidence

Awards Daily’s Megan McLachlan makes the case for Showtime’s Yellowjackets and why it should score all the Emmys.

It was a year ago that Showtime released the first trailer to Yellowjackets, a series that I had been waiting for with bated breath ever since I read the description in a trade announcement. On paper, the show sounded like nothing I had ever seen on television, and then when I finally watched it, I realized I was right.

I love the story behind the genesis of the series—that co-creator Ashley Lyle read snarky male commentary about what a Lord of the Flies with women would look like and decided to completely blow these male minds and depict how women might really react in this dramatic situation. She wanted to show that women wouldn’t “collaborate to death.” While shows like The Wilds on Amazon would try something similar, they did it with a controlled, sci-fi twist (and then subsequently added boys to the mix in Season 2 before getting canceled). With Yellowjackets, the focus is on the women, the trauma they experienced in 1996, and how their participation in as-yet-to-be-revealed activities would affect the rest of their lives. Lord of the Flies always relied on the bigger analogy of the story rather than really examining what the boys were going through.

Yellowjackets‘ pilot (Emmy nominated and written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson) is one of the strongest pilots I’ve seen in years, and one of the things it really excels at is giving you a lot of information and characters without overwhelming you. Or if it does overwhelm you, it only spurs you to keep watching. We meet Melanie Lynskey’s Shauna as an adult, masturbating in her teenage daughter’s bedroom, before she tosses her vibrator with a shrug into the laundry basket. This character has a story with or without the plane crash, and Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series nominee Lynskey holds Shauna’s emotional cards so close that we never quite know what she’s thinking.

And while you might think masturbating in your daughter’s bedroom is fucked up, we don’t even meet the most fucked-up character until the last half of the episode! Yellowjackets has two timelines (that work seamlessly together under Emmy nominee Karyn Kusama’s exceptional direction), over a dozen characters, a cinematic soundtrack, and a cold open that could haunt you for the rest of your TV-watching life. What I loved about this first episode is that you’re watching a lot of love and attention go into these characters and this story right away. Lyle and Nickerson know what they’re doing and they’re unspooling this narrative with confidence.

And then of course, the other Emmy-nominated episode “F Sharp” (written by Lyle, Nickerson, and co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco) is almost like a continuation of the pilot, picking up right where the plane crash leaves off, and really helps us get to know Emmy Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series nominee Christina Ricci‘s Misty, who serves as both a hero and a villain in that second episode. Her narrative of being bullied and emerging as the one with the most know-how in the wilderness really takes a turn when she destroys the emergency transmitter in the final moments of the episode. How’s that for collaborating to death.

Interestingly, Yellowjackets has a bit in common with another fellow Emmy nominee, Stranger Things, as they are both series that play with nostalgia. On the Netflix horror thriller, we as an audience participate in an ’80s nostalgia exercise, where we essentially get to live in a classic ’80s movie and relive the music, hair, and fashion of the decade. On Yellowjackets, the characters are looking back at the past, the ’90s, before an event would change their lives, the same way we as an audience (or for those who lived through the ’90s) look back at the time period on this show before a huge event would change our lives—and the world—two years into the next decade. The show might be about the trauma that these specific characters went through, but like the as-yet-to-be-revealed activities that they don’t want to talk about, we as an audience are also active participants.

Yellowjackets airs on Showtime.