It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when, but at some point over the Christmas holidays, Showtime’s Yellowjackets went from a low-key phenomenon to a cultural force. A lot of the show’s popularity can be attributed to excellent reviews and a horror tinged puzzle that had armchair sleuths engaged in Reddit commentaries, but it could also be plain nostalgia for the more
innocent era of the 1990s.

Yellowjackets is a 10-hour episodic drama about a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team that gets stranded in the frozen Canadian wilderness following a plane crash. The show is purposefully vague about how many of them make it back to civilization and which of them survived a possibly cannibalistic denouement. Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, the grisly story juggles timelines set in 1996 and 2021.

“The 1990s is a period that Ashley and Bart know really well and were very particular about wanting to get right in terms of their whole script and design,” says Plummy Tucker, ACE. “The show really hit a nerve which I think is down to how the action stays true to the characters and to characters that resonated with people.”

She adds, “The mystery is what keeps you hooked; it is so intricately woven. You don’t know who is going to end up in that pit full of spikes. The wider theme explores the relationship between our adolescent and adult selves with the wilderness of the landscapes in the earlier timelines being almost a blank page for adolescence to play out; a metaphor for the comingof-age-drama.”

Tucker began on the project in fall of 2019 with director Karyn Kusama her regular partner who together have made the features Girlfight, Aeon Flux, Jennifer’s Body, The Invitationand Destroyer.

“It’s always tricky doing the pilot of a series and it was clear this was not a straightforward show,” she says. “There were a lot of twists and turns as to how it would go plus we had the twin timelines. One challenge of mechanics was to be clear about which adult actress corresponded to which teen actress, and we decided to go with direct transitions from the younger version of the character to the older version and vice versa, when we could, but the structure beyond that was pretty much as it was scripted.”

The ‘90s throwback is cemented in the casting. Yellowjackets stars Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Melanie Lynskey and Tawny Cypress playing the adult versions of their younger selves (Misty, Natalie, Shauna and Taissa). Says Tucker, “It’s rare to see an ensemble of so many women and girls and have them be so individual without stereotyping.

Each of these characters grows throughout the series in a way that remains true to the individual. I could see the seed of that in the pilot. “One thing I really loved about how the show developed is how true each character’s actions and words are to them as individuals. I feel like that is one of the things people can hook into with the show. Even when things you don’t expect happen they never seem like something this character couldn’t do, no matter how bizarre.”

She continues, “Karyn trusted [Ashley and Bart’s] vision for the show and where they were going to take it. They were toying with different avenues at that time for different characters. I got a little bit of information but not a lot. Obviously, we knew certain characters were going to survive since we see them 25 years later but we didn’t know what else was going to happen.”

Tucker’s pilot had been finished nearly a year earlier by the time Kevin D. Ross, ACE, joined when the project was greenlit for a post-COVID start in December 2020. He’d been invited by executive producer and showrunner Jonathan Lisco having previously worked together on AMC period drama Halt and Catch Fire and Warner Bros.’ crime drama Southland.

“I thought I knew who had survived and who didn’t but I wascompletely wrong,” says Ross on reviewing the pilot. “I attacked it as a horror drama with knowledge of script developments just a couple of episodes ahead.”

Ross would work on Episode 5 for example when the script for Episode 7 came out. “Sometimes I like to know where the story will be going since that can help inform the cut, but here we were largely going blind. If I’d been off base Jon would have corrected me.”

Episode 2 lays out the crash scene in greater detail and depicts Misty (Sammi Hanratty) amputating and cauterizing the leg of assistant coach Ben (Steven Krueger) in order to save his life. The episode’s 2021 sections feature Misty being held up at gunpoint by Natalie.

“I feel like the post-crash scenes really got us into the story and to meet all the main characters plus helped establish how we move between timelines,” says Ross. “It was a fine line to balance going between shots of past and present. That was something we had to work on to make sure we didn’t weight one side or the other as more important.”

The show’s word-of-mouth success is also attributed to a release schedule that dropped episodes weekly over three months as opposed to letting audiences binge watch. The editors had fun watching the audience guess – and guess wrong – what was going to happen as the show went viral.

Ross also cut Episode 9 ‘Doomcoming,’ the opening scene of which (in the 2021 timeline) is when Shauna kills her boyfriend after confirming that he is digging in her past. “That scene worked on its own but it wasn’t getting into the character as much as we hoped. So we came up with this idea of using these flash frames – little snippets – to show her manic, traumatic motivation for killing him. We wanted to heighten the senses. I suggested stealing four frames from the next episode that no one had seen yet. It’s a flashback in her memory – but the audience hasn’t seen it yet. So, we put in this four-frame snippet of dead Jackie in the snow but in such a way that it was obscured and you couldn’t tell who it was.

“That had the effect of bringing the storyline to the audience’s attention because they were trying to guess what they’d seen in that short clip. The payoff was in the next week’s episode. That was exciting to pull off that manipulation of the audience.”

The series’ fellow editors were Jeff Israel, Kindra Marra and Damien Smith. Editorial was conducted remotely – an unusualsituation for editors on an episodic drama with so many overlapping storylines, characters arcs and plot reveals. “It changes the whole work dynamic in the edit room,” notes Ross. “Normally editors in the same edit facility are able to chat about story down the hall from each other but here we had to schedule a chat on zoom just to talk story. We would watch each other’s cuts a little later in the process too so it all felt a little more isolated in this situation.”

Ross says he was amazed by the reaction to the show. “I’ve been on a lot of series where the work has been of real quality and no one watches and it cancelled and it’s gone. I’ve also experienced Stranger Things [Ross edited four episodes of S1 and S2] where we were thinking, ‘I hope people are going watch,’ and then when it lands you are astonished by the response.

So, working on Yellowjackets I knew it was good but again I’m hoping people watch it, and then it gets this cult following. “I had to create a new user name on Reddit so I could go on and comment without spoiling anything or revealing that I work on the show. It was like a game that a lot of us in the crew played. We got to play along and experience the ride as if we
were just fans,” he says.

“People tried to distill it into Lord of the Flies meets Alive butit is more than that. It’s female-centric which audiences are still not used to seeing combined with a fascinating survival story and an enigmatic mystery. It’s more than anything a story with three dimensional characters whom people are invested in.”