TV Review – Yellowjackets Season One

Yellowjackets Season One (Showtime)
Written by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco, Sarah L. Thompson, Liz Phang, Ameni Rozsa, Chantelle M. Wells, Katherine Kearns, Cameron Brent Johnson
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Jamie Travis, Eva Sørhaug, Deepa Mehta, Billie Woodruff, Ariel Kleiman, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, and Eduardo Sánchez

Yellowjackets was a show I knew of, a piece of background noise in the seemingly infinite media landfill of our age. What I knew about it before watching the first season is that it was about people getting stuck out in the wilderness. I also knew who some of the actresses in the series were, but beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much. It’s not too odd to know a decent amount about things I don’t watch simply through cultural osmosis. Nevertheless, something about what I had seen of Yellowjackets kept me interested enough to finally sit down and watch the first season. I was met with something I liked but didn’t love, an interesting mix of Desperate Housewives and Lost that intrigues me enough to be up for the second season.

In 1996, a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team went missing after their plane to nationals in Seattle crashed. They were deep in the Canadian wilderness and survived for eighteen months. The details of who made it out and how they were rescued are obscured from the audience for now. The show takes place in flashbacks to 1996 and follows four survivors in the present day as they deal with the trauma and troubles they brought back. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is married with a teenage daughter, living a dull suburban life. Taissa (Tawny Cypress) has become a candidate for New Jersey senator with the election approaching. Her wife becomes increasingly concerned as Taissa’s behavior becomes more erratic. Natalie (Juliette Lewis) has just gotten out of yet another stint in rehab and wants to reconnect with Travis, the soccer coach’s son, who was one of the survivors. However, life continues to deal her a cruel hand. And then there’s Misty (Christina Ricci), the team’s equipment manager, who now works as a nurse in an elder care facility. She’s a knowledgeable person but with a potent strain of sociopathy. 

In typical Lost fashion, flashbacks reveal shocking truths about these women. By the end of the first season, we’re only sure of a few people not making it, allowing the door to be open for more adult versions of the teenage characters to show up in later episodes. It’s a very smart setup for a television series because you can drip-feed your audience information about the characters just enough to keep them hooked. It’s aided by a strong pilot episode directed by Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Jennifer’s Body, Destroyer) and a cold open that will attract most viewers. A teenage girl runs screaming through snowy woods and falls into a spike trap. She’s retrieved by people dressed head to toe in animal furs. The dead girl is hung up and bled out as she is prepared to be butchered and cooked. This opening gives away that our characters will fall into not just cannibalism but into some bizarre cultish religion based on their clothing. One person wears a crown of antlers and sits in the center as they feast. 

Because we have two parallel shows going on, there are moments where you find yourself enjoying one more than the other. The present-day mysteries surrounding the adult characters have been more interesting than the stranded girls in 1996. That’s not to say the flashbacks are bad; I was more into them in the first couple of episodes before the showrunners tapped the breaks, and it was clear the supernatural elements would be sparser to not run out of gas. Those first few episodes, especially the trip to the lake and the discovery of the cabin, had me very interested. But, with a five-year plan, the showrunners may not want to reveal the show’s antagonist quite yet. There is a moment involving a prop jet near the end of this first season that had me laughing out loud both from shock & the ironic humor of who this was happening to.

Yet, I will always appreciate strong acting rather than well-written soap opera, so I like the adult portion of the show the most. That’s due in part to having fantastic actors in these roles. The dynamic between Nat and Misty is one of the best, both humorous & twisted. Lewis & Ricci are clearly having fun playing these characters, each showing off their acting chops in different ways. Lewis is playing it jaded, a woman having lived a rough life and reaching a tragic point. Ricci is playing it as a two-faced schemer, someone unafraid to drop narcotics in a person’s drink or disable her date’s engine to get a ride home. Ricci’s character of Misty is quite the wild card, and I genuinely have no idea where she’ll end up in the present or what she did in the past that her adult friends may not know about her.

Tawny Cypress is a new fact to me; a glimpse over her credits shows she’s been in a lot of crime procedural shows which is not a genre I watch. She’s excellent, and there’s a particular scene at a political fundraiser where she gets some one-on-one time with a potential donor that stood out as her best moment in the first season. The character of Taissa has a lot of interesting elements that have been set up, and I’m curious to see how they play out in the second season. She seems like someone about to lose everything they have, and how she reacts to that should be wild.

Melanie Lynskey is my favorite among the adult cast because she’s a mix of someone who just looks like an average suburban mom with the acting skills to reveal layers of complexity beneath that surface. Lynskey is believable because she knows how to sound like a mom but is also a potential psycho. That affords her some automatic sympathy, at least from me, because I was reminded of all the moms and female teachers I worked with as an elementary teacher (the mom part, not the psycho part, though now that I think about it…). Then when she starts making threats and eventually committing murder, you feel conflicted. I love that in a show, being put in a place where the protagonist is not a morally pure figure but a complicated one. 

The teenage versions of these characters are a bit hit-and-miss. The strongest actress in the 1996 portions is Jasmin Savoy Brown as teenage Taissa. Brown has been on my radar since I first saw her on The Leftovers, and she continues to be a strong player here too. Sophie Thatcher as teenage Natalie is another strong contender. Some scenes leave me wondering if she’s just trying to do a Juliette Lewis impersonation, but the character becomes more interesting when she moves away from that. There’s something about Samantha Hanratty as young Misty that doesn’t work with me. I think it’s a case of “She’s All That” syndrome where we have an actress who is very much “traditionally” attractive and treated like an ugly outcast. Not believable. That’s not a problem with this show, but American media generally refuse to cast someone who just looks like an average person, especially in younger roles. Ricci can at least bring a very engrossing performance to the table. 

I might draw some hate from the fans, but I’m very lukewarm about Sophie Nélisse, the teenage Shauna. I don’t think it helps Nélisse’s performance that she’s paralleled by Lynskey, who is extremely good. Nélisse has a fascinating character to play, but there are plenty of scenes in the latter half of season one where she comes across as tired or bored in a scene that needs some intense to insane energy happening. Again, I don’t dislike Nélisse; I thought her performances in films like Monsieur Lazhar and The Kid Detective were great. But here, it feels very hit or miss; sometimes, she captures the tragedy of her character, but then, others, she comes across as disinterested. 

Ella Purnell as Jackie, who doesn’t have an adult counterpart in the series, is probably my second favorite next to Brown. Purnell completely captures the moody teenage vibe that someone like Jackie would have. She’s a queen bee, prone to proclaiming that her friendship is ending or beaming passive-aggressive rays across a room. Of all the characters, she has the most difficulty adjusting to being stranded in the wilderness, which provides for many great conflicts.

Like any show of this kind, secrets are revealed throughout the first season, but plenty more questions arise to hook us for a second batch of episodes. The cannibalism aspect only shows up in the pilot and never gets explored further, meaning it looms over the past like a dagger. At some point, we’re going to see these characters dissolve into barbarism, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out and what happens when they get rescued. The general public doesn’t know what really went down in those woods despite plenty of articles and tell-all books. I don’t know how I’ll feel about the show a few seasons into it, but they have me hooked for now. I won’t like it if the supernatural/horror elements are given more of a backseat to draw them out. Yellowjackets works best when they deliver unsettling & disturbing moments, and I worry those will become something you only get most in the season premieres and finales.