Yellowjackets (TV series)

• Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nélisse as the adult and teenage versions of Shauna. In high school, Shauna was best friends with Jackie. Smart, she was accepted to Brown University. She cares for others. As an adult, Shauna is a dissatisfied stay-at-home mom with a teenage daughter and an indifferent husband. Lynskey says her character is unable to be herself because she wants to fit in. She also says Shauna is "more intense and darker than she allows herself to believe."[1]
• Tawny Cypress and Jasmin Savoy Brown as the adult and teenage versions of Taissa. In high school, Taissa was focused on winning. She slide-tackled a teammate she thought was not good enough for nationals, breaking her leg. As an adult, she is running for the New Jersey state senate while maintaining her same-sex marriage and raising a young son who is struggling socially. Cypress says Taissa is "looking for an ideal, she's looking for perfection, she's looking for a place of power and everything in its place. As long as her life is 'dot-dot-dot,' then she can say nothing's wrong with her. So that's what she wants most of all."[1]
• Ella Purnell as Jackie, the team captain of the Yellowjackets soccer team. In high school, Jackie was best friends with Shauna. Shauna slept with Jackie's boyfriend. Jackie has an ideal life she tries to create, which often leaves others with the short end of the stick. Purnell says her character has a hard time adapting to her environment in the wilderness because she is used to the "social constructs and the hierarchy that exists in high school" and that she does not know how to gain respect from others.[2]
• Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher as the adult and teenage versions of Natalie. In high school, Natalie was labeled a "burnout", did drugs, and was anti-social. As an adult, she leaves rehab and quickly falls off of the wagon. She has a strong personality and cares little about what people think of her. Lewis says her character's mission in life is to "get even". She added, "To play such animosity and friction and 'soul death' is sort of the content of my character. It's a deep dive into pain, and toeing the line of destruction."[1]
• Christina Ricci and Sammi Hanratty as the adult and teenage versions of Misty. In high school, Misty is the team's equipment manager. She is seen as pathetic and weird and bullied. After the crash, Misty demonstrates knowledge useful for survival and becomes a leader. As an adult, she is a care facility nurse and a ruthless manipulator of others. Hanratty says her character "doesn't always think long-term. She's very smart, but she really is only in the moment and that can be a bit scary."[3] Ricci says Misty was happiest when the group was lost in the wilderness because she felt respected.[1] "I think she's a person who at her core is someone who wants to be happy ... Misty doesn't need anyone to enjoy her life. She has constructed a world in which she's entertaining herself because nobody was going to do it for her," Ricci said.[4] Series co-creator Bart Nickerson added that Misty's character was always supposed to be incapable of relating with other people.[5]
• Steven Krueger as Ben Scott, the assistant coach of the Yellowjackets soccer team. In the wilderness, Ben loses one of his legs and is taken care of by Misty. Krueger says his character has to deal with both his injury and the fact that he is the only adult who survives the crash. As a result, Krueger says Ben is "the subject of what you might call unrequited crushes, which of course, tends to have an interesting effect when you put people in a situation where they are stranded together in the woods."[6]
• Warren Kole and Jack Depew as the adult and teenage versions of Jeff Sadecki. In high school, Jeff was dating Jackie and cheating on her with Shauna. As an adult, he is married to Shauna and works at a furniture store. He is dull, does not appreciate Shauna, and is possibly cheating on her. Kole based his performance on some of his colleagues and said he did not meet with Depew or Lynskey to discuss how he would portray Jeff because he was one of the last cast members to join the production.[7]

• Keeya King as Akilah
• Peter Gadiot as Adam, a body shop owner, who starts dating Shauna after they have a minor auto collision
• Alex Wyndham as Kevyn, Natalie's best friend before the plane crash. In 2021, he is a police officer.
• Kevin Alves as Travis, the oldest of Coach Martinez's sons. He becomes Natalie's best friend after the plane crash.
• Luciano Leroux as Javi, the youngest of Coach Martinez's sons
• Courtney Eaton as Lottie, a student with a prescription for Loxapine to treat schizophrenia.[8]
• Jane Widdop as Laura Lee, a deeply religious Christian
• Sarah Desjardins as Callie, Jeff and Shauna's daughter
• Liv Hewson as Van
• Alexa Barajas as Mari
• Rekha Sharma as Jessica Roberts, a fake journalist investigating the group in 2021.
• Rukiya Bernard as Simone
• Carlos Sanz as Coach Martinez
• Tonya Cornelisse and Pearl Amanda Dickson as the adult and teenage versions of Allie.
• Amy Okuda as Cat Wheeler
• Briana Venskus as Jessica Cruz
• Rukiya Bernard as Simone, Taissa's wife
• Aiden Stoxx as Sammy, Taissa's son

The idea for the series was largely influenced by the Donner Party and the 1972 Andes flight disaster, both true stories about people who resorted to cannibalism to survive.[21] In August 2017, Warner Bros. Pictures announced an all-female film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, a novel about a young group of boys stranded on an island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves.[22] After reading the announcement, Ashley Lyle found that a lot of people were skeptical that young girls could descend into the same barbarism as young boys. With that thought in mind, Lyle conceived the idea for Yellowjackets with her husband Bart Nickerson as a "metaphor for teenage hierarchy" and placed a large part of the series in New Jersey, the state they both grew up in. The pair are also credited as showrunners alongside Jonathan Lisco, who was brought to the series by executive producer Karyn Kusama.[21][23] Lyle added, "I just wanted to tell what felt like a very real story about teenage girls."[24]

Lyle and Nickerson pitched the series with a 35-minute presentation, which included talks about the first season's ending and a five-season storyline. The series was originally going to take place in the 1970s and the 1990s, but both time periods were moved twenty years forward to make the setting more familiar to viewers.[25] Nickerson said the use of two timelines allowed for the studying of interpersonal dynamics and how trauma can affect a person's life.[26] HBO was a contender to purchase the series but ultimately rejected it, in part due to its similarities with one of its own properties. Lyle says the smartest question she heard during the pre-production phase was from HBO's Francesca Orsi and David Levine, who asked, "What are you trying to say with this show?" In his answer, Nickerson said the show was going to deconstruct the "organizing principles of a society". Yellowjackets was eventually sold to The Mark Gordon Company, a production company owned by Entertainment One. The project was then pitched to Gary Levine, president of entertainment for Showtime Networks, who was immediately on board.[25] On May 9, 2018, Showtime announced it had acquired the rights to the series.[27]

"When we were formulating and developing the idea we always saw this as a multi-season story and our goal in the first season is to very much answer certain questions, because I personally get very irritated with shows that drag everything on forever and don't give you any answers. So, we wanted to answer some questions and ask some new ones, so that is hopefully what we accomplished over the course of this season." — Ashley Lyle[28]

The pilot episode was not written with any actresses in mind and auditions were held in Los Angeles. "We decided pretty early on we weren't going to get overly focused on a physical match," Lyle mentioned. As a result, some cast members had to dye their hair and wear contact lenses to match the physical characteristics of their counterparts.[26] Melanie Lynskey was the first person to join the cast. Lyle said the role of Shauna was "the trickiest to cast" because they "wanted to find an actress who could embody somebody who is really trying to figure out who they are, which is kind of a tricky internal thing to express through her acting." For the role of Natalie, Nickerson said the casting department was searching for "someone who was really free-spirited and unique who could play both a sort of wildness and a vulnerability." Though most of the auditions were held in-person, Sophie Thatcher submitted a self-recorded audition tape and was cast as Natalie before Juliette Lewis, who portrays the character's adult counterpart.[28] When asked if the group's survival would depend on their gender, Thatcher replied, "I think naturally, especially at such a young age, women are more emotionally intelligent. So to turn into that cannibalistic mindset ... it maybe took them longer just because I think women are smarter than men. But I think that's it. Besides that, there's no difference. They're going to go batshit crazy."[29]

Sammi Hanratty and Christina Ricci star as the teenage and adult versions of Misty.

Nickerson said it was vital to find two actresses who could portray Misty with "a deep kind of humanity that could make it feel lived in and real"; the role was eventually given to Sammi Hanratty and Christina Ricci.[28] On joining the cast, Hanratty said she originally auditioned for the role of Natalie before being brought back four times to audition for the role of Misty: "I'm not gonna lie, I was so crushed [when I didn't get Natalie] because I loved the project. They said they would keep me in mind. Then, I think it was about a week later that I got the audition for Misty, which was so exciting. Because I was like, 'Oh, this girl is interesting as can be." To give her another chance, Lyle and Nickerson wrote a scene specifically for the casting process in which Misty confronts a teacher over cheating. After Hanratty was brought back, Lyle said "It was immediate. As soon as she read that scene for us, we said, 'OK, she is Misty.'"[5] Hanratty described the auditions as being "really intense". She did not meet any of her co-stars until the table read for the pilot. When asked if she was treated differently when in costume, she added, "I don't think we've talked about this, but I was seeing a therapist while I was in Canada, and that was something that we discussed. I was definitely treated differently ... I got more self-conscious, and my walk even changed a bit. I just felt like a bigger target, you know, as a person."[30]

According to Nickerson, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress were cast as Taissa because they were both able to portray her with a "level of dynamic strength" as well as "vulnerability and fragility". Ella Purnell portrays Jackie, a character who proved difficult to cast. Lyle said the character was supposed to be a stereotypical popular girl with "little cracks of that façade". She explained, "I think that her insecurity, her vulnerabilities needed to be on display pretty early on or you'd end up hating her and that was sort of the opposite of what we wanted the audience to feel."[28] Lynskey, Cypress, and Brown were announced as series regulars in October 2019,[31][32] with Lewis, Ricci, Purnell, Hanratty, Thatcher, Sophie Nélisse, and Amy Okuda joining the cast in November.[33][34] The following month, Ava Allan, Courtney Eaton, Briana Venskus, and Liv Hewson were cast in recurring roles.[35] In June 2021, it was reported Warren Kole, Peter Gadiot, Keeya King, Alex Wyndham, Sarah Desjardins, Kevin Alves, and Alexa Barajas would also star.[36][37]

The pilot episode was greenlit in September 2019 and shot in Los Angeles in November.[38][39] In an interview, Lynskey said the masturbation scene from the pilot represented her character's lack of boundaries.[40] In the pilot's opening scene, a flash-forward shows a group covered in fur clothing. Hanratty was the only cast member present while the scene was shot and the other characters were played by stunt coordinators. Hanratty says the writers have not told the cast which characters appear in that scene: "We all have our theories on who that is too, and we have a group chat in our cast where we try to come up with theories ourselves of what's going on and who we think is who."[3]

In December 2020, Showtime gave Yellowjackets a series order.[41] Filming on the rest of the series reportedly began in Vancouver on May 3, 2021, and concluded in early October. Aside from Vancouver, other filming locations included the Panther Paintball & Airsoft Sports Park in Surrey, which was used as the site of the plane crash, and The Bridge Studios in Burnaby.[39] The actual plane crash took two days to film. Purnell said the plane in the scene was positioned at "an angle and shaking around and moving back and forth."[40]

In November 2021, Purnell summarized the timeline of the production: "It's crazy. Here's how it went; we shot the pilot, we took like a year and a half off in COVID and then we went to Canada and shot the whole season in six months. We were in this super intense immersive bubble. We wrapped three weeks ago and now I'm doing a press junket. It's been crazy."[2] During post-production, the music for the pilot episode was composed by Theodore Shapiro and the rest of the first season was scored by Anna Waronker.[42] On November 10, 2021, a premiere for the series was held at the Hollywood Legion Post 43 in Los Angeles.[43] Yellowjackets premiered on Showtime on November 14.[44]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 43 reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A genre mashup that blends smoothly, Yellowjackets presents an absorbing mystery with plenty of sting."[45] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 78 out of 100 based on 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[46]

The first six out of ten episodes of the first season were given to critics to review ahead of the series premiere. Entertainment Weekly's Kristen Baldwin graded the show with a B+ and gave praise to the performances and its story: "Yellowjackets maintains an intriguing tonal balance in early episodes. The survival timeline is pure horror, all steadily increasing dread and glimpses of grotesque violence. It helps that the flashback cast is strong enough to carry an entire drama on their own; standouts Brown, Thatcher, and Nélisse are particularly adept at delivering performances that feel distinct and yet authentically echo the personas of their adult counterparts."[47]

In a mixed review, Candice Frederick from TheWrap found the storyline to be a bit complicated: "Yellowjackets can feel tiresome with the sheer frequency of all those flashbacks, and the fact that it dabbles in too many genres when it could settle on its solid mystery thriller elements. But when it commits to its chilling suspense, the show is utterly fascinating to watch. Even more, it finds compelling ways to explore issues like trauma and the façades we build for ourselves that carry from youth through adulthood — elevating what would otherwise be a much flatter genre piece."[48] Writing for Rolling Stone, Alan Sepinwall gave the series three stars and a half out of five and described it as a combination of Lord of the Flies, It, Lost, Alone, and the works of Megan Abbott. Sepinwall added, "Many of its influences already overlap, and thus work together well. The ones that don't can at times combine to create something that feels new and potent, but at others make it feel like the stew could have done with fewer ingredients."[49]

According to ViacomCBS CEO Robert Bakish, Yellowjackets is Showtime's second-biggest streaming series of all time.[50]