Yellowjackets, the critically acclaimed Showtime drama about a high school girls’ soccer team that turns cannibalistic, is about to get a much wider audience come October.
In the show, a plane carrying that soccer team to a national championship game crashes, leaving the girls stranded in the wild. Oct. 1 is when Netflix subscribers will get to enjoy the first season, which was inspired by the real-life Flight 571 disaster in 1972 in which a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team to a match crashed in the Andes mountains, leaving almost 30 people stranded. It was a tragedy recounted in the 2023 Netflix film Society of the Snow.
Ashley Lyle, who co-created Yellowjackets with her husband, Bart Nickerson, and Jonathan Lisco, also drew inspiration for the show from another source: Specifically, from William Golding’s classic survival novel Lord of the Flies. In an interview with The New York Times, Lyle recalled having read about a planned remake of the book that would have gender-swapped the characters and involved young girls on the story’s uninhabited island instead of boys. There was some reluctance about whether such a change could work, about whether girls could descend into the same sort of sickening chaos.
This made Lyle think to herself that the people saying such things “were never a teenage girl.”
In terms of what Yellowjackets is actually about: The story unfolds across two timelines, one set in the present day and one set in 1996.
The latter follows the aforementioned girls’ soccer team, the Yellowjackets, as they set out for a national tournament. Per Netflix: “All hell breaks loose when their private plane crashes in the Ontario wilderness and the survivors end up stranded there for 19 months, finding ways to survive by foraging for food and water, and hunting the local wildlife. But when winter approaches, they soon realize they might have to take extreme actions to stay alive.
“As the girls come to terms with their dire conditions, the team slowly devolves into separate rival (and possibly cannibalistic) factions, some who swear by rituals of the wilderness, and others whose only goal is to survive long enough to get home.”
In the modern timeline, some of the girls (now women) who survived prepare to attend their 25-year high school reunion — which brings up all sorts of old wounds and memories from the past. “Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Nat (Juliette Lewis), and Misty (Christina Ricci) are each struggling in their own ways to reckon with what they lived through as teenagers, and finding it more difficult to navigate their adult relationships and careers in the process. Their lives begin to spiral once more as their unhealed traumas come to a head — and they’ll go to great lengths to conceal what really happened in the woods.”
The series, Season 3 of which should arrive sometime next year, has a killer soundtrack jam-packed with punk-rock gems, while the whole thing is an engrossing blend of horror and drama that explores the weight of guilt and secrets that follows people from youth into adulthood. Check out Episode 1 of Yellowjacket’s first season, available for free on YouTube, below.
