Yellowjackets on NOW TV and Sky Atlantic: why you should get stuck into the show now

A barefoot teenager in a nightdress runs, screaming, through snowy woods. The feral yelps of her pursuers – her hunters – echo through the pines. Sobbing, she slaloms onwards, then plummets into a concealed pit full of sharpened sticks. Another girl, masked and dressed in animal skins head-to-toe – apart from the battered pink Converse on her feet – stands over the impaled, twitching corpse and inhales.

“Yum,” she seems to be thinking, “we will have dinner tonight.”

Yellowjackets – the American TV series now streaming on NOW TV and Sky Atlantic that’s the must-see of early 2022 ­– might be a show about a girls’ football team, and about how teenage bonds are tested both in youth and in middle-age, 25 years later. But as is clear from its opening scene, this is very much not another high school drama.

And that’s before we’ve witnessed the horrifying plane crash that strands the girls in the middle of nowhere for 19 hungry months. And before the action toggles from 1996 to the present day, when, in adulthood, the kids who’ve not been eaten find themselves blackmailed by someone who seems to know exactly what happened in the woods all those years ago – and how they survived.

Yes, the 10-part series features the requisite pretty, homecoming queen-type, Jackie, captain of the New Jersey school soccer team (the Yellowjackets) whose plane goes down in the Canadian Rockies in 1996. She’s played by 25-year-old East Londoner Ella Purnell (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children). There’s also the drug-taking bad girl, Natalie, portrayed in adulthood, in the show’s parallel timeline, by Juliette Lewis. That’s a smart piece of ’90s-aware casting, one matched by the appearance of another of the decade’s film icons. Christina Ricci plays the grown-up version of an equally well-worn televisual teen trope, the speccy, bullied nerd (Misty) who desperately wants to hang with the cool crowd.

But all that kid-cannibalism stuff? Not so familiar.

Yet that’s just one of the reasons why you should binge Yellowjackets now. For sure, it is about teenage girls coming of age, the bubbling cauldron of sexuality and friendships, and about how a sports team tries to keep up the teamwork in the face of huge challenges. But all that is relocated to a brutal survivalist drama. Think: Lord of the Flies with girls in football strips. Or: I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with the stalker-slasher antagonist replaced by a pagan cult.

Nor is Yellowjackets “just” a post-Squid Game gore-fest. In the contemporary timeline, the perimenopausal Yellowjackets are battling suburban boredom, spousal infidelity, career vs parenting crises and midlife singleton loneliness. That’s not to mention post-plane crash PTSD that manifests itself in all sorts of bold-face ways, including drug addiction, chucking into the family stew an unlucky rabbit that strays into the garden and a wee hours habit of (literally) eating dirt. For Taissa, the adult Yellowjacket who’s running for the New Jersey state senate, the latter risks being a bit of a vote-loser.

Like the plummeting plane that starts the action, Yellowjackets crashed into November’s pre-festive wilderness of winter TV programming. Unlike HBO’s returning Euphoria, that other provocative American youth-centred drama on air right now, the Showtime show didn’t come trailed by a blizzard of expectation, marketing or breathless social media anticipation.

Broadcasting weekly, this psycho-chiller built its audience by word-of-mouth, artfully parcelling out the dual-timeline narratives’ big reveals. When the gobsmacking finale aired last week, it left more cliffhangers than a colony of puffins. Luckily, Yellowjackets was renewed for a second series not long after it launched.

Even after watching one episode – although, full disclosure, I binged all ten in three otherwise dreary January weeks – it’s not hard to see why.

Yellowjackets’ savvy mix of high concept fantasy (see also: Lost) and gritty contemporary suburban thriller (cf: Breaking Bad) is part of it. So is nostalgia. The ’90s have never been more now, and Yellowjackets delivers in spades, from the haircuts to the fashion to the music. The soundtrack, assembled by the same music supervisor who works on Euphoria, blasts era-evoking killer tunes galore: Salt-N-Pepa’s Shoop, Wilson Phillips’ Hold On, Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It, Smashing Pumpkins’ grunge classic Today.

But even more appealing than the rad tunes, shaggy ’do’s and creeping sense of supernatural dread is the show’s – in the reductive telly sense, anyway – feminism. This is a series that literally and figuratively foregrounds girls and women. The boyz II men are mostly checked-out, useless or dead – or heading that way.

Yellowjackets’ stellar cast of fresh young talent couldn’t agree more. Over the last couple of weeks, I interviewed, separately, Purnell and Jasmin Savoy Brown, who plays the young Taissa.

“People are hungry for female-led, female-driven content,” Brown told me, reflecting on the reasons for the show’s ratings and watercooler success in the US. “And especially female-driven content that is a reflection of reality. By that, of course, I don’t mean bears sacrificing themselves for them to eat,” she added of a scene that may or may not have happened in one episode (no spoilers, or spike-laden traps, here). “I mean: women and girls are multifaceted, and there are ugly and brutal sides. And [in culture] we don’t explore that very often.”

“I love the scenes where the girls turn on each other,” echoed Purnell, who FaceTimed from an Oxford Street Costa just before she flew back to Los Angeles, her adoptive home for the past three years, “where they’re messy and scary and violent – all the things that we just don’t see that often.” As she pointed out of this full spectrum of female behaviour, “we’ve never had an entire show written about it – one that really pushes the very depths of it.”

Meanwhile, deep in an isolated Canadian forest, the leaves are turning and winter is coming. Alas, rescue is not. Not for another good year or so, at least. So, get stuck into Yellowjackets now, before they get stuck into each other.

Yellowjackets is streaming now on NOW TV and Sky Atlantic