Yellowjackets - Season 1-2
“In just two seasons, Yellowjackets has become a staple show for queer viewers.”
Title: Yellowjackets
Episodes Reviewed: Seasons 1-2
Creators: Ashley Lyle 👩🏼🇺🇸 and Bart Nickerson 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Sarah L. Thompson 👩🏼🇺🇸 (5 eps), Liz Phang 👩🏻🇺🇸 (5 eps), Ameni Rozsa 👩🏼🇺🇸 (5 eps), Ashley Lyle 👩🏼🇺🇸 (4 eps), Bart Nickerson 👨🏼🇺🇸 (4 eps), Jonathan Lisco 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Katherine Kearns 👩🏾🇺🇸 (2 eps), and various
Reviewed by Sam 🧑🏻🇺🇸🌈
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 4/5
Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Emmy-nominated drama Yellowjackets has earned its ranks among Showtime’s most iconic shows. It follows the survivors of a tragic plane accident where a girl’s high school soccer team persists through the challenges of the wilderness.
The series mixes scenes from past and present to show the crash's psychological impact. Dual portraits of characters like Shauna (played by Melanie Lynskey in present-day scenes and Sophie Nélisse during the past) and Taissa (Tawny Cypress/Jasmin Savoy Brown) vividly illustrate the enduring effects of their unfortunate experiences. Full of twists and turns, every episode holds surprises as the girls spend months in the woods. All the while, Yellowjackets tackles a wide range of topics, from friendship to betrayals to occultism.
The characters’ self-preservation tactics are shocking, but the show excels when highlighting their humanity. While we can’t all relate to their experiences—and between amputating a leg with an ax or being chased by a pack of wolves, I certainly hope not!—anyone can appreciate how the characters support one another throughout the show.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Yellowjackets is one of the few shows with an all-female main cast, aided by a writing team that’s also primarily made up of women. Male characters take a back seat, enriching the narrative but never overshadowing the central focus on women’s experiences.
Every female character is fully developed and allowed to be flawed. Shauna, a housewife who seems to have a perfect marriage with her husband, Jeff (Warren Kole), struggles to connect with her daughter and has an affair. Taissa is a married woman running for state senate who experiences fugue states that jeopardize her campaign. These women are complex, grappling with past traumas while navigating present challenges.
The show also explores female friendships. While TV shows and movies often pit women against each other, Yellowjackets defies that trope by emphasizing how the members of this high school soccer team must rely on one another to stay alive in the wilderness and afterward. For example, even though Shauna is cheating with the boyfriend of team captain Jackie (Ella Purnell), Shauna and Jackie’s bond is essential to the story. Despite the hurt and anger Jackie feels at discovering the affair, the two girls still rely on each other for survival. Their dynamic captures loyalty and betrayal, revealing the nature of many real-life female friendships. These nuanced portrayals make Yellowjackets an excellent showcase for women who contain multitudes.
Race: 3.5/5
Several main characters are women of color, most notably the aforementioned Taissa and Lottie, a cult leader who has supernatural visions. (Courtney Eaton, who plays Lottie’s present-day scenes, and Simone Kessel as Lottie’s younger self, are both Māori.) While this is great for onscreen diversity, the story rarely addresses the characters’ racial backgrounds, which feels like a missed opportunity to ground them with more realism.
At its most glaring, Taissa’s present-day story follows her becoming the first Black woman elected into New Jersey’s state senate. But without acknowledging the specific challenges she faces due to racial dynamics—dynamics that are further complicated by Taissa’s marriage to another woman—the writing feels overly simplistic.
Similarly, the show implies that Lottie is Indigenous through vague references, such as her strong connection with the land, but it’s never explicitly addressed. This is surprising considering that Lottie has visions that result in her asking a Christian teammate about religion. Lottie never says whether her supernatural abilities link to her Indigenous background. Therefore, it’s unclear whether the show uses the “noble mystic” stereotype of depicting Indigenous people as having some spiritual connection that non-Indigenous people lack. This murkiness raises questions about how the character’s identity aligns with the storyline, and whether it relies too heavily on the actors’ backgrounds instead of being fully developed within the narrative.
LGBTQ: 5/5
Yellowjackets provides the sapphic representation that the TV world is sorely lacking. As mentioned earlier, Taissa, one of the show’s main characters, is married to a woman. She also dates Vanessa (Liv Hewson/Lauren Ambrose) during the soccer team’s stranding. Both pairings explore the complexities of sapphic love in different kinds of trying circumstances.
The depth of Vanessa and Taissa’s relationship especially goes beyond simple romance. The two girls navigate both the physical dangers of wilderness and the emotional intricacies of their feelings for each other. Vanessa brings a protective yet vulnerable dynamic to their connection, while Taissa learns to let her guard down to let love in. Their story highlights the resilience and beauty of sapphic love that challenges traditional narratives, which often depict lesbian relationships through tropes of self-denial or internal struggle.
In addition to Taissa and Vanessa, the show also features Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), the soccer team's assistant coach, who’s gay. Before the accident, Ben had a boyfriend with whom he had recently broken up. Throughout the series, Ben grapples with the challenges of reconciling his true self with the expectations of his environment. His most pivotal moment is when he comes out to the team as gay and unapologetically embraces his identity. This act highlights the show’s exploration of the courage required to live authentically despite external pressures. Even though TV shows and movies overly focus on coming out narratives, Yellowjackets sidesteps cliches by following Ben’s ongoing struggle with his queerness, providing a more layered exploration of self-acceptance.
In just two seasons, Yellowjackets has become a staple show for queer viewers. It provides unique LGBTQ characters and compelling stories that explore identity, relationships, and persistence through a queer lens.
Bonus for Disability: +0.50
Though the show doesn’t outright diagnose anyone, characters spend much of their screen time working through trauma and PTSD related to the plane crash. Episodes portray the rawness of their emotions and chart the long-lasting impacts of their tragic experiences.
Yellowjackets also critiques how society ignores the mental health of public figures. All the survivors of the plane crash are wary of media outlets who embellish their experiences. The show reveals how negative attention from the media can worsen the after-effects of trauma—a topic that needs to be discussed more often in an era where awful incidents are often captured on video and publicly aired (and dissected, and made into memes, and so on). By humanizing characters who suffer from media sensationalization, Yellowjackets encourages an open dialogue about the need for compassion and understanding.
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.50/5
From sapphic storylines to female friendships, Yellowjackets covers its topics sensitively. The show also delves into mental health issues, particularly PTSD. However, it lacks adequate exploration of how race and ethnicity play a factor into characters’ lives. As the show progresses into its third season, which is currently in production, Yellowjackets has great potential to keep advancing the conversations it began around mental health, and to address the gaps in how it develops its characters of color.
Like Yellowjackets? Try these other survivalist titles.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Voyagers (2021)
The Terror