Yellowjackets (TV series)

Yellowjackets is an American thriller drama television series created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. The story follows a group of teenagers involved in a 1996 plane crash, and follows the consequences of the event in their adult lives in the year 2021. It stars an ensemble cast led by Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Liv Hewson, and Courtney Eaton as a group of teenagers. The adult version of the characters are performed by Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Simone Kessell. Ella Purnell, Steven Krueger, Warren Kole, Kevin Alves and Sarah Desjardins also star.
The series premiered on Showtime on November 14, 2021. It initially received critical acclaim, particularly for its story and the performances of the cast, however reception became more mixed in later seasons. Its accolades include seven Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and acting nominations for Lynskey and Ricci. In December 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which premiered on March 26, 2023. In December 2022, the series was renewed for a third season, which premiered on February 16, 2025.
In 1996, a high school girls' soccer team from fictional Wiskayok, New Jersey travels to Seattle for a national championship tournament. While flying over Canada, their plane crashes deep in the wilderness, and the surviving team members are left stranded for nineteen months. The series chronicles their attempts to stay alive as some of the team members are driven to cannibalism. It also focuses on the lives of the survivors 25 years later in 2021, as the events of their ordeal continue to affect them many years after their rescue.
Ideas for the series were influenced by aspects of the true stories of the Donner Party (1846–1847) and the 1972 Andes flight disaster (though critics have noted that the themes present in the stories told by the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash challenged and were the opposite of dystopian fictional tales such as Yellowjackets and Lord of the Flies).
In addition, Ashley Lyle read an announcement in 2017 about a “gender swapped” version of Lord of the Flies, and found that a lot of people were skeptical that young girls could descend into the same barbarism as young boys. With that thought in mind, she conceived the idea for the series with her husband Bart Nickerson as a "metaphor for teenage hierarchy" and placed a large part of the series in New Jersey, the state they both grew up in. The title, Yellowjackets, came up on a Google search for sports team names; Lyle said it was a "perfect fit thematically" as yellowjackets are "very dependent on a queen and the dynamics of the hive are very specific". Lyle and Nickerson are also credited as showrunners alongside Jonathan Lisco, who was brought to the series by executive producer Karyn Kusama. Lyle added, "I just wanted to tell what felt like a very real story about teenage girls."
Lyle and Nickerson pitched the series with a 35-minute presentation, which included talks about the first season's ending and a five-season storyline. The series was originally going to take place in the 1970s and the 1990s, but both time periods were moved two decades forward to make the setting more familiar to viewers. Nickerson said the use of two timelines allowed for the studying of interpersonal dynamics and how trauma can affect one's life. HBO was a contender to purchase the series but ultimately rejected it, in part due to its similarities with Euphoria, one of its own properties. Lyle says the smartest question she heard during the pre-production phase was from HBO's Francesca Orsi and David Levine, who asked, "What are you trying to say with this show?" In his answer, Nickerson said the show was going to deconstruct the "organizing principles of a society". Yellowjackets was eventually sold to The Mark Gordon Company, a production company owned by Entertainment One. The project was then pitched to Gary Levine, president of entertainment for Showtime Networks, who was immediately on board. On May 9, 2018, Showtime announced it had acquired the rights to the series.
On December 16, 2021, after the first five episodes aired, the series was renewed for a second season. Levine said they had "not heard the pitch for season 2, the writers' room has not even come together yet, they are going to come together in January. I'm sure Ashley, Bart, and Jonathan have some loose ideas but they hadn't fleshed out their ideas and they certainly haven't conveyed them to us." On February 9, 2022, Levine said the creators had "always given us hints about things to come, but we haven't done a long-range plan. We wanted to make the first season count. We've all buried ourselves in that first season and worked hard to make it the success it was. They [last week] went into the writer's room and with Jonathan Lisco to start to unearth what can happen in season two. I love that they have some general idea of a five-year arc, but we take it one season at a time and get very granular about making it satisfying." By May 2022, the writers were stated to be in the initial stage of writing the scripts. On December 15, 2022, three months ahead of the second-season premiere, Showtime renewed the series for a third season. Writing began on May 1, 2023, but halted the next day in accordance with the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. In June 2023, series co-creator Ashley Lyle said that a bonus episode would air between the second and third seasons. However, in December 2024, Lyle confirmed its delay: "The truth is that there is a bonus episode but we may need to wait a bit longer for it".
The pilot episode was not written with any actresses in mind, and auditions were held in Los Angeles. "We decided pretty early on we weren't going to get overly focused on a physical match," Lyle mentioned. As a result, some cast members had to dye their hair and wear contact lenses to match the physical characteristics of their counterparts. Melanie Lynskey was the first person to join the cast. Lyle said the role of Shauna was "the trickiest to cast" because they "wanted to find an actress who could embody somebody who is really trying to figure out who they are, which is kind of a tricky internal thing to express through her acting". Lynskey questioned the showrunners and extracted as much information as she could about her character's past and the five-season storyline to improve her performance. For the role of Natalie, Nickerson said they searched for "someone who was really free-spirited and unique who could play both a sort of wildness and a vulnerability". Though most of the auditions were held in-person, Sophie Thatcher submitted a self-recorded audition tape and was cast as Natalie before Juliette Lewis, who portrays the character's adult counterpart. When asked if the group's survival would depend on their gender, Thatcher replied, "I think naturally, especially at such a young age, women are more emotionally intelligent. So to turn into that cannibalistic mindset ... it maybe took them longer just because I think women are smarter than men. But I think that's it. Besides that, there's no difference. They're going to go batshit crazy."
Nickerson said it was vital to find two actresses who could portray Misty with "a deep kind of humanity that could make it feel lived in and real"; the role was eventually given to Sammi Hanratty and Christina Ricci. On joining the cast, Hanratty said she originally auditioned for the role of Natalie before being brought back four times to audition for the role of Misty: "I'm not gonna lie, I was so crushed [when I didn't get Natalie] because I loved the project. They said they would keep me in mind. Then, I think it was about a week later that I got the audition for Misty, which was so exciting. Because I was like, 'Oh, this girl is interesting as can be." To give her another chance, Lyle and Nickerson wrote a scene specifically for the casting process in which Misty confronts a teacher over cheating. After Hanratty was brought back, Lyle said "It was immediate. As soon as she read that scene for us, we said, 'OK, she is Misty.'" Hanratty described the auditions as being "really intense". She did not meet any of her co-stars until the table read for the pilot. When asked if she was treated differently when in costume, she added, "I don't think we've talked about this, but I was seeing a therapist while I was in Canada, and that was something that we discussed. I was definitely treated differently ... I got more self-conscious, and my walk even changed a bit. I just felt like a bigger target, you know, as a person."
According to Nickerson, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress were cast as Taissa because they were both able to portray her with a "level of dynamic strength" as well as "vulnerability and fragility". Ella Purnell portrays Jackie, a character who proved difficult to cast. Lyle said the character was supposed to be a stereotypical popular girl with "little cracks of that façade". She explained, "I think that her insecurity, her vulnerabilities needed to be on display pretty early on or you'd end up hating her and that was sort of the opposite of what we wanted the audience to feel." Lynskey, Cypress, and Brown were announced as series regulars in October 2019, with Lewis, Ricci, Purnell, Hanratty, Thatcher, and Sophie Nélisse, joining the cast in November. The following month, Ava Allan, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson were cast in recurring roles. In June 2021, it was reported Warren Kole, Peter Gadiot, Keeya King, Alex Wyndham, Sarah Desjardins, Kevin Alves, and Alexa Barajas would also star.
Casting for the second season began in mid-2022. In August 2022, Lauren Ambrose and Simone Kessell joined the cast to play the adult versions of Van and Lottie; their roles were also upped from recurring to series regulars. Elijah Wood and Nuha Jes Izman were also added to the cast in season-long recurring guest roles, while Kevin Alves's role as teenage Travis was upped from recurring to series regular. Wood plays Walter, "new citizen detective who is not represented by a younger self on the show". Jason Ritter, who is married to Melanie Lynskey, guest stars in one episode of the second season.
In January 2023, Variety reported that Keeya King, who played teen Akilah in season one, had exited the series. Her role was recast with Nia Sondaya. Nicole Maines was cast as Lisa, an associate of adult Lottie attempting to recover from past trauma. Additionally, François Arnaud guest-stars in four episodes portraying Paul. His character is described as "a New York writer and secret boyfriend of Coach Scott (Steven Kreuger) who reminds Coach Scott of what might have been".
In September 2024, it was announced that Hilary Swank was cast in a recurring role.
The pilot was greenlit in September 2019 and shot in Los Angeles in November. According to location manager Jimmie Lee, several scenes from the pilot were filmed on top of the ski slopes on Mammoth Mountain. A number of scenes set in the high school were filmed in and around John Marshall High School in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. In an interview, Lynskey said the masturbation scene from the pilot represented her character's lack of boundaries. In the pilot's opening scene, a flash-forward shows a group covered in fur clothing. Hanratty was the only cast member present while the scene was shot and the other characters were played by stunt coordinators. Hanratty says the writers have not told the cast which characters appear in that scene: "We all have our theories on who that is too, and we have a group chat in our cast where we try to come up with theories ourselves of what's going on and who we think is who."
In December 2020, Showtime gave Yellowjackets a series order. Filming restarted in Vancouver on May 3, 2021, and concluded in early October, with the young and older cast taking weekly turns to shoot their scenes. Aside from Vancouver, other filming locations included the Panther Paintball & Airsoft Sports Park in Surrey, which was used as the site of the plane crash, and The Bridge Studios in Burnaby. The plane crash scene took two days to shoot. The orgy scene from episode nine was organized with intimacy coordinator Katherine Kadler. Eaton described it as "uncomfortable scene to shoot" due to its depiction of sexual assault. In an interview, Lynskey said Cypress, Ricci, and Lewis stood up for her after she was body shamed by a crew member, with Lewis writing a letter to the producers on her behalf. In November 2021, Purnell summarized the timeline of the production: "Here's how it went; we shot the pilot, we took like a year and a half off in COVID and then we went to Canada and shot the whole season in six months. We were in this super intense immersive bubble. We wrapped three weeks ago and now I'm doing a press junket. It's been crazy."
Filming for the second season began in August 2022, with the first episode directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer. In early February 2023, the cast of the 1990s timeline of the series completed filming their scenes.
Filming for season three started on May 14, 2024, after having been delayed because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Co-showrunners Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco made their directorial debuts this season, with Nickerson helming the premiere and Lisco episode three.
The music for the pilot was composed by Theodore Shapiro. The rest of the first season was scored by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, members of the rock bands Shudder to Think and That Dog, respectively. Wedren was invited to the series by Kusama after the series was picked up and Shapiro was unable to return. The main theme song, "No Return", was written and performed by Wedren and Waronker, who said they "aimed to channel our off-kilter '90s roots into something that felt like 'then', but could only have been made now, just like the show". Lyle and Nickerson were initially hesitant with the idea of featuring a theme song due to their growing rarity in the mainstream but were eventually convinced otherwise. "Mother Mother" by Tracy Bonham was used as the temp music for the theme, which first appears in episode three and features the sounds of a Farfisa organ. According to Wedren, "The producers really, really encouraged us to go out on multiple limbs and really be experimental and try stuff, which is such a rare direction to get". Lakeshore Records made "No Return" available to stream and download on January 6, 2022. A soundtrack album was also released on Spotify. On March 9, 2023, Florence and the Machine released a cover of No Doubt's "Just a Girl" as a single to promote the second season. The fourth, seventh and ninth episodes of the second season featured a cover of the show's theme song by Alanis Morissette, which was released as a single on April 14, 2023.
A premiere for the series was held on November 10, 2021, at the Hollywood Legion Post 43 in Los Angeles. Yellowjackets debuted on Showtime on November 14. The second season premiered on March 26, 2023, and the episodes became available two days earlier to stream for Showtime subscribers. In November 2024, it was announced that the third season is set to premiere on February 14, 2025, before making its air debut two days later.
The first season was released on DVD and manufactured-on-demand Blu-ray on July 19, 2022. The second season was released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 10, 2023.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 77 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "A genre mashup that blends smoothly, Yellowjackets presents an absorbing mystery with plenty of sting." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 78 out of 100 based on 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
The first six out of ten episodes of the first season were given to critics to review ahead of the series premiere. Entertainment Weekly's Kristen Baldwin graded the show with a B+ and gave praise to the performances and its story:
Candice Frederick from TheWrap found the storyline to be a bit complicated:
Writing for Rolling Stone, Alan Sepinwall gave the series three stars and a half out of four and described it as a combination of Lord of the Flies, It, Lost, Alone, and the works of Megan Abbott. Sepinwall added:
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 171 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.15/10. The website's consensus reads: "Having already made a startling first impression, Yellowjackets coils itself in a second season preparing for the long haul—thankfully, its superb performances and mesmeric ambience are fine substitutes for fast answers." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 77 out of 100 based on 30 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 85% of 114 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Still at its very best when lost in the wilderness, Yellowjackets' third season is inescapably uneven but carried along effortlessly by its stronger elements." Metacritic assigned a score of 64 out of 100 based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Yellowjackets is the second-most streamed series in Showtime's history behind Dexter: New Blood. According to Showtime, the penultimate episode of the first season was watched by 1.41 million viewers across all platforms, while the season finale (the first episode to not air after an episode of Dexter: New Blood) brought 1.3 million viewers across all platforms. Yellowjackets averaged more than 5 million weekly viewers, the highest for a freshman series on the network since Billions in 2016. In January 2022, Vulture's Alison Willmore and Kathryn VanArendonk discussed Showtime's decision to release episodes weekly instead of launching the entire season on the same day, noting the positive word-of-mouth and time given to a viewer to theorize: "In an era when shows and movies seem to barely manage to break through before being pushed aside by whatever's new, and when Netflix is so dominant that other platforms have to really fight for attention at all, Yellowjackets has sustained a conversation all while airing on Showtime."
On a 2023 episode of Celebrity Family Feud, the elder Yellowjackets competed against the younger ones. The teams were Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey, and Warren Kole against Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Nélisse, and co-creator Ashley Lyle.