Have you heard the buzz about Yellowjackets? A girls’ high-school football team survive a plane crash in the wilderness. The squad’s gruelling efforts to survive in the woods descends into macabre – and possibly cannibalistic – rituals. It’s part gruesome survivalist thriller, part study of trauma and part portrait of suburban ennui.
Created by Narcos writers Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Showtime’s hit drama – the network’s biggest first-year series since Billions launched in 2016 – flashes backwards and forwards between two timelines: one in the Nineties, when the crash happened, and one in the present, where the now-adult women are still being haunted by their experiences and pursued by a mysterious enemy. It plays like a gender-flipped version of William Golding’s classic schoolboys-turn-savage novel Lord of the Flies. It also expertly mines nostalgia, from the soundtrack (Hole, Smashing Pumpkins) to the terrific performances from Nineties icons Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci.
