YELLOWJACKETS: FAR TOO MANY QUESTIONS, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH ANSWERS

Yellowjackets is an American Thriller Drama Television Series created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, about a State Champion New Jersey High School girls’ Soccer Team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness on their way to Seattle for a National Tournament, leaving the survivors of that crash stranded in the woods for nineteen months. 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 involved in a plane crash in 1996, with Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Simone Kessell playing their adult counterparts. Ella Purnell, Steven Krueger, Warren Kole, and Kevin Alves also appear in prominent roles.

The series premiered on Showtime on November 14, 2021, and has since received critical acclaim, particularly for its story and the performances of the cast. Its accolades include seven Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and acting nominations for Lynskey and Ricci. The series was renewed for a second season in December of 2021, which premiered on March 26, 2023. In December of 2022, the series was renewed for a third season.

The show currently boasts an impressive 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an Audience Score that is much less so, at 72%. It also has a Metascore of 78 (based on 57 critic reviews) on Metacritic, with a User Score of 6.7, and a 7.8/10 on IMDb (based on almost 70,000 reviews), and holds the sixth spot on the websites list of most popular TV Shows.

This show started off with so much promise. The premise felt fresh, putting an interesting spin on the whole Man (or Woman) vs Nature theme. The production design is also really good so far. Casting was great, and the characters feel fairly thoroughly fleshed out. The acting is also very good here, which can be difficult wherein you have so many older characters that also have younger counterparts, but I have to say, this show pulls that trick off in brilliant fashion. The writing is pretty good throughout, and the story I one that I have sincere interest in.

But not everything about this show is great. Though the story is a very interesting one, the way the writers decided to tell it is extremely flawed, but this is something that tends to be a staple of Showtime TV content. In the pilot episode, the show hops back and forth between the girls post-crash (in 1996), the girls as grown women in 2021 and the girls pre-crash (again, in 1996), just after winning the New Jersey State Championship. Because the writers use flashbacks and flash-forwards as a continuous storytelling vehicle throughout the series, the show poses questions that, in my opinion, it is taking far too long to answer. Some critics seem to think that the acting and production design make up for this unforgivable mistake, but I don’t. As season two of the show ended on May 26 of this year (19 episodes in), and we all sit around waiting for a premier date for season three, we still don’t have answers to questions that we posed in the pilot episode…A YEAR AND A HALF AGO.

I think the show would have been better off with a few more episodes added to season one, combined with a faster pace so that we could close out each season with some measure of closure. But that seems to be the last thing the writers want to do, and I personally think this decision may come back to bite the show in the end because most shows lose viewership over time, and things like this can do a lot to make viewers feel bored..like they’re being led on, until finally they just tap out. I think that’s where I am with this show right now. Again, I think the show is surely better than most other shows on the air, and that is proven by its insanely high Tomatoes Score and it’s ranking on IMDb, but with all the streamers out there, and all the content to choose from, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be sticking around, waiting for Showtime and the writers to decide to finally decide to tell us what’s going on, especially trying to watch it once a week, one episode at a time, over the next however many years. My advice? This is a show that can wait until the series comes to an end. Maybe it will play a little bit differently when you can binge the entire thing in a week or so.

Seasons 1 and 2 of Yellowjackets can be found on the Roku Channel (for free), Showtime, Paramount Plus, HULU, Sling TV Fubo TV, Amazon Prime and YouTube TV (with premium subscription). It can also be viewed by the episode on Apple TV, Google Play Movies and Vudu (for $1.99/Episode), but if the offering should leave you wanting, don’t say I didn’t warn you.