Yellowjackets is everything television should be. That’s a strong statement, I know, particularly considering how the medium has been poked, prodded, and pushed into all sorts of strange territory recently. A show with cultural saturation? No, we all watch our own things. Episodic formats? Old school. High concept mysteries that aren’t miniseries? Nobody’s waiting years to find out what happened.
Sure, there’s a handful of shows that resemble what we watched and how we watched them twenty years ago, but the medium has become something we can’t boil down into a single concept. Except for Yellowjackets, which is so many things that trying to describe it makes it sound like the fever dream of a raving lunatic. It is a throwback to patient, episodic storytelling, with the creators throwing fans into a frenzy when they revealed the mystery-laden show has a five-season plan. It’s also the kind of star-studded, emotionally complex show about adults that used to be the bread and butter of mid-budget filmmaking, a market that migrated to television as the film industry underwent its own radical restructuring. It’s also got high strung teenagers, wilderness survival, murder, cannibalism, queers, possession?, and nighttime frolics with dogs, as a treat.
It really does have all these things in its ten-episode first season, which can more sanely be described as a series about a high school soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness and the ramifications on the survivors 25 years later. Each episode spends time with the adults and the teens, with series-long, season-long, and episode-long mysteries playing out, so far with a bang at every ending. It’s addictive. It’s engrossing. It’s making us wait. It’s the perfect blend of what television used to be and what it’s become, and it’s oh so delicious.
Balancing Act
If there is a common denominator to television, it’s the act of keeping as many balls in the air as possible. Whether conceived as a one-season miniseries or a years-long cash cow, television is about filling hours and hours with a single story. The best way to make that successful is to give yourself as many options as possible, so series creators and showrunners like to juggle as much as possible, particularly early on, to give themselves plenty of options down the line.
For many series, that means a messy first season. Every once in a while someone comes up with a concept and team so perfect that it assuredly is what it is from square one (think Veronica Mars). But for every hardboiled girl detective that pops off the screen in her first few minutes, there are twenty messy government employees who grow into the smart, lovable protagonists who make shows like Parks and Rec a lasting success.
Yellowjackets is, somewhat miraculously, the former. It has no right to be. It’s a show that puts all the genre balls in the air and only tosses away a few as the first season plays out, and yet not a single one is bobbled, mishandled, or forgotten about.
I mean, there’s an eyeless ghost dude that pops up a few times. So is this a supernatural show? Maybe! There’s other moments that indicate it might be, which settles in nicely alongside the show’s pulpier elements. For instance, the opening moments have some of its most nightmarish imagery, with a girl running through the woods, getting caught in a trap, and a masked figure staring at her. From there it bounces to messy teenage girl shenanigans pre-crash, which extends throughout the season and gives it a primetime soap kick. And the present-day storyline has a whole blackmail thread, complete with a gun-totting Juliette Lewis in hot pursuit of the person who takes their ransom money.
What’s wild, and mind-bogglingly impressive structurally, is not that these elements sit beside real and complex portraits of friendship, love, and deep-rooted trauma, but that they aren’t neatly separated out. The pulp stuff that keeps you on the edge of your seat are in the same scenes as the sweetest, most tender moments of people connecting, often without a breath between them.
It’s why the series is nearly impossible to describe without sounding incoherent. It should be incoherent. They shouldn’t be able to make the perfect ‘90s lesbian joke while a couple argues over the existence of forest spirits. But it does, and that makes every moment electric with meaning and possibility, and, even after ten episodes, giving it so many places to go.
Making it Work
Of course, it’s one thing to wrangle the sprawling material. It’s a whole other thing to bring it to life. Here is where people will first notice the care (and money) put into making this project work, with a headlining trio of should-be legendary actresses navigating its immensity with ease while the rest of the cast lives up to their examples.
In a semi-meta turn, Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis all had moments in the ‘90s, so for Yellowjackets to put them at the front of the adult cast, playing characters haunted and defined by a tragedy that launched them into infamy in 1996, would be stunt casting if the show didn’t remind us that they’re among the few actors who could pull this off.
It’s no secret that great roles are hard to find for women, are even tougher if you don’t fit into familiar boxes, and get near impossible as women get older. All three of these women had skills no one quite knew what to do with, so they hovered for decades, working but never becoming the massive stars others of their generation became. It would take a miracle of a project for any of them to achieve the fame and recognition they deserve, but as I’ve already said, Yellowjackets is something of a miracle.
Ricci and Lewis get to sink their teeth into the oddest odd couple on TV, with Ricci channeling a malevolent offshoot of the Only Murders in the Building gang while Lewis brings back her world-weary recovering addict schtick. They annoy each other, or at least Ricci annoys Lewis. You can never really tell what Ricci is thinking, a wildcard in the middle of a wildcard series with a bird on it. She’s having the most obvious fun, but Lewis is her perfect straight man, trudging back into town and into this mess with all the enthusiasm of someone whose snack is being held hostage by a vending machine (at least she knows how to handle these situations).
Tawny Cypress makes their pitch-perfect time bomb a foursome, equalling her more known counterparts to complete an absolutely riveting group that’s tied clumsily by their past. They’ve never revealed what happened in the woods, and they don’t need to talk about it amongst themselves. Still, you feel the damage of unnamed horror in each of them, and in their broken ways, they support each other as best they can.
Filling in the backstory falls to the actors playing their teenage versions, who must match their adult counterparts and handle the wilder aspects of what went down in the woods. A combination of eerie casting, excellent hair and makeup, and solid mannerism mimicry make it easy to track our adult foursome among the much larger group who survives the initial plane crash, which begs two of the biggest questions of the first season: could more adult characters be introduced and which actresses in their 40s do you want in this series?
For now, you can relish Sophie Thatcher doing punk Lewis (that one in particular rivals Jessica Keenan Wynn’s uncanny evocation of Christine Baranski in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), Jasmin Savoy Brown budding into the power lesbian Cypress portrays, and those flashes of Lynskey in Sophie Nélisse’s face.
And before we dive into the series’ true star, I have to give a shout to the excellent turns by Ella Purnell as the team captain who crumbles in the woods and Liv Hewson as the goalie with perfect reactions to everything. They don’t have adult counterparts (yet) so who knows how far they’ll go, but they’re delivering in roles that are absolutely pivotal to the unfolding madness.
And now it’s time for Lynskey. Whether you’re a hardcore fan like myself or simply a person who recognizes her face, it’s impossible to miss that she’s the lynchpin of Yellowjackets in front of the camera.
Lynskey’s energy, the one that few people know what to do with, involves being very soft before straight-up murdering someone. It’s been there from the beginning; that’s why she was cast as a teen who kills her mother in 1994’s Heavenly Creatures. After that, the utilization of her dangerous vulnerability, which sometimes results in death and other times in more generalized social destruction, has only been sporadically unleashed. It’s an energy that, for obvious reasons, isn’t in demand for women. But it’s exactly what Yellowjackets needs, and it’s exactly what makes Yellowjackets so unique.
This is a story that should be about men. We’ve seen this story about men. That story is terrifying and thrilling, but it doesn’t allow its characters to slow down and giggle about an extramarital fling. That isn’t to say that men behave this way and women behave this other way. It’s to say that our stories portray men and women these ways, and Yellowjackets isn’t having any of it. It’s going to have the gritty, gross descent into chaos that this story about men would have. It’s also going to have the silly, supportive acquiescence to doom that this story about women would have. You’re going to get all of it without embarrassment or shame, and when you have the rare project bold enough to explore that level of emotional complexity while still having a horrifying blast, you call Melanie Lynskey.
Conclusion: Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets is your new favorite show, or it will be once you sit down and watch it. It’s got everything, and it leaves you with plenty to titter about while waiting for the next episode. Who knows if it can sustain this perfection, but for now, savor it.
What did you think of Yellowjackets? Where do you think it will go next season? Who are the actors you want added to the cast? Let us know in the comments!
Yellowjackets is now available on Showtime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX22D65TqAs
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