Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson — married writing partners — came up with the idea for the Showtime series Yellowjackets while writing for Narcos. "We loved doing it, but it's drenched with machismo," says Lyle of the Netflix series inspired by Colombia's drug cartels. "We wanted to diverge from that."
And they did with Yellowjackets, a female-centered — and brutally dark and gory — coming-of-age drama about a high school girls' soccer team that gets stranded for nineteen months in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. In the first season, it's strongly hinted that the girls resort to cannibalism.
Yellowjackets jumps back and forth between the 1990s, when the crash occurred, and the present day, where the survivors, now middle-aged, are trying to move on from their traumatic past. Lyle and Nickerson originally planned to crash the plane in the 1970s, thinking they'd explore a Dazed and Confused vibe. Showtime "very wisely," according to Lyle, suggested they shift the high school years to the 1990s, when they grew up, so they could draw from their own memories for music and other period details.
Jonathan Lisco (Halt and Catch Fire) joined Lyle and Nickerson as executive producer and showrunner after reading the pilot. "There's an adage that great storytelling is algebra plus fire," he says. "This script had both."
Lyle and Nickerson shaped Yellowjackets' cast of characters while walking their dogs in L.A.'s Griffith Park. "We started taking 'character walks,'" Lyle says. "We'd do a Misty walk, then a Jackie walk and a Shauna walk."
When casting, the showrunners generally chose the actor playing the adult character first. Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and Tawny Cypress play the present-day Yellowjackets — Shauna, Natalie, Misty and Taissa, respectively. Sophie Nélisse, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty and Jasmin Savoy Brown portray the girls as high schoolers.
Independent movies from the 1990s, like Welcome to the Dollhouse, and psychological horror films from the 1970s served as inspiration for director–executive producer Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Destroyer), who set a look and feel for the season with the pilot.
The team decided not to "go with a big filter or a color scheme" to set the flashbacks apart from the present-day scenes, Nickerson explains. "We've always talked about how if this was a novel, these [timelines] would both be written in present tense. They are both happening now in a very real way."
Before jumping into season two, the showrunners were savoring the response to season one. Lyle and Nickerson, big fans of Mindy Kaling, were delighted when she tweeted that she wants to see the girls eat each other. "For all those chomping at the bit for cannibalism," Lyle teases, "I have two words: season two."
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #4, 2022, under the title, "Something Wild."
