I’m back again with another enthusiastic streaming show recommendation, and one that recently caused me to realize something about myself. If I don’t start watching a show almost immediately after it is released, I have discovered that I often let it linger in the background until another significant time to jump in and watch it comes around. And I’ve noticed that I have a pattern of doing this without ever having realized it.
I recently did it with Only Murders in the Building. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in the show to begin with, because I was. But I didn’t get around to starting until season two wrapped up recently, when a lot of people were talking about it. I like the show. It’s exactly what I thought it would be, and if you are a fan of Steve Martin and/or Martin Short, you can quickly tell that this was designed exactly to let them do what they do best.
But that’s not why I’m writing this time. The show that brings me here is Yellowjackets, on Showtime, which has a second season arriving in March. I heard a little bit about it when it first premiered but it didn’t get into my rotation at the time. I’m here to spread the good word because this show is TREMENDOUS.
The premise is simple enough: a New Jersey high school state champions girls soccer team in 1996 heads out on a trip to nationals that they will, unfortunately, never arrive at, as their plane crashes in what we must assume is the Canadian wilderness. The show jumps back and forth, from 1996 to 2021, and we quickly learn that some of those girls somehow made it out of there 19 months after the crash.
If you know nothing more than that, and the idea sounds intriguing, I highly suggest giving at least the first episode a try. There are a lot of familiar touchstones here, including a harrowing plane crash, the never-wracked immediate efforts afterward, and the inherent drama of adults interacting with each other after living through such a defining, singular experience together. You’ll get a taste of Alive here, a big helping of Lost there, and more than a dash of Lord of the Flies…not to mention, even a hint of Stephen King’s It, given that the kids survive unspeakable trauma together and are drawn back to each other as adults.
I appreciate so much about this show that I don’t even know where to start. It gives us a simple premise that can be summed up in a sentence, but it certainly plays with our expectations of the genre. Over the course of ten tense episodes, they touch on everything you expect them to, from “person that survives a gruesome injury” to “what about the black box?” to “nobody is coming and we need to learn to live out here.” While familiar, Yellowjackets is wholly its own thing.
The casting is top-notch. It’s an ensemble show, and the fact that we meet girls who survive the crash that we don’t see later as adults leads to an easy conclusion about what happened to some of them. But they absolutely killed it (no pun intended) with some of the characters that we get to see as both teens and adults. Melanie Lynskey gets top billing, and before this she probably classified as a first-ballot Hall of Famer for the type of character actress that you see, enjoy, and who makes you immediately grab your phone so you can check IMDB to see what you know her from. Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci are a couple more familiar faces.
Lynskey is fantastic here as Shauna, the suburban wife and mom that wants to leave all of that stuff pertaining to the crash in the past…which turns out to be even more difficult than she hoped, even 25 years later. She’s got a husband she’s pretty sure is cheating on her and a resentful, smart-assed teenage daughter who cops attitude with her at every turn. It’s not that Shauna’s life is awful, it’s just that it certainly didn’t turn out to be the one she was looking forward to pre-crash.
The same cannot be said for some of her Yellowjackets teammates. One is a politician in the midst of a campaign, another ends up…well, let’s just say that her adult life doesn’t come as a shock following what we learned about her personality as a teen. Another is so fun to watch in both iterations that I won’t spoil a thing by even talking about her. But in each of those cases, the casting decisions on both roles were absolute home runs. Over the course of the season, we see that this experience affected each of the survivors in distinct and unique ways, and thus the manner in which they handle it corresponds to who they really are.
If I have to ding a few points for anything, it’s that some plotlines are more interesting than others so far. I don’t care much about the politician’s race, but that’s okay, because at times she’s not sure if she does either. But anything and everything that happens in the woods is wildly compelling. We are completely on board with the twisted logic that leads to these girls making some questionable decisions because—let’s face it—there aren’t a lot of good options for them here. The writing is superb, and they pull at your emotional heartstrings like crazy with some flawlessly-placed 90s songs as needle drops that serve the story and remind you exactly when these girls were enduring this. I didn’t have “getting emotional over a Goo Goo dolls song” on my January streaming bingo card, but…well played, Yellowjackets…well played.
The writing is so good, both at capturing 40-something urban struggles and those raw nerves that can only belong to a teenager, when certain things felt SO IMPORTANT. It’s a huge nod to the creative forces behind this show that you can care equally about whether these people will even physically survive at the same time as wringing your hands and your heart over who is in love with whom and how that can possibly work out.
I have one episode left to go in the debut season. And much like a certain show set in Westeros, some serious shit went DOWN in the penultimate episode. In the early seasons, Game of Thrones would often use that ninth episode to drop the hammer and follow up with a tenth that began to move some pieces around the board to set things up for the campaign to come. Yellowjackets might do that too. There could be storylines to come involving adult characters that I haven’t even seen yet, or at least not since those days in the wild. There’s plenty left to wrap up at the current point, including stories in both ’96 and ’21. There are an almost limitless number of places that this show could go, and I can’t wait to watch and find out how they do that.
Season 2 premieres on March 24 on Showtime. I’ve been streaming them on Showtimeanytime, which is included by my TV provider.
Disclaimer: This show can be…a lot. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs. Violence. Difficult, adult situations that I won’t describe. If that doesn’t bother you, then dive right in. But absolutely don’t watch this one with your kids at home.