American Rust recently had its season finale and when that show started I remarked how it unfortunately premiered after shows with a similar premise like Your Honor and Mare of Easttown. The show that replaces it on the Showtime schedule is Yellowjackets which also has the unfortunate timing of premiering close to similarly sounding shows. About a year ago, Amazon premiered its own Lord of the Flies but teenage girls survive a plane crash in a remote area show The Wilds (to be fair, Showtime actually announced their version on May 9, 2018, while Amazon was announced June 28 of that year).
Given the mid-nineties setting, it is also hard not to think
of Cruel Summer which aired earlier
this year on Freeform (who did not greenlight the series until September
2019). While Yellowjackets takes place the year (1996) the trio of years Cruel Summer takes
place they do share a similar soundtrack.
But where Cruel Summer had
one of their actresses sing Smashing Pumpkins for the show along with other various
cover songs, the budget for a Showtime show is much higher and can afford
getting the actual Smashing Pumpkins song as well as a copious amount of
nineties jams. Though I do not remember anyone
still listening to Marky Mark or Snow in 1996 and the ending of the premiere does feature
a cover of an eighties power ballad. Okay, one
of the characters on Yellowjackets does
a kind of disturbing rendition of Breakfast
at Tiffany’s to another character. Then each of the
episode (at least of the ones I watched) are named after a nineties pop culture
references including a certain Red Hot Chili Peppers album which episode features
a lot of two of the words in the title, none of the third, while the fourth… well, the
fourth is still up to some debate.
Thankfully I did not watch The Wilds so I did not spend much time comparing the song, and aside
from the music and the time jumping (Yellowjackets
does not stay entirely in the nineties, it does flash forward to present day),
there is not much comparison to the Freeform show. The show follows an undefeated soccer team
from New Jersey area that is heading to Washington State to compete in nationals
when their plane, a charter flight by one of the player’s rich father (do not ask
me why that father, or any other of the parents did not bother going with them;
just two coaches and two sons of one of the coaches are along for the trip), crashes in the Canadian
wilderness after bad weather causes the plane to go off course. Then they have to
defend for themselves for nineteen months before being found. Do not ask me why none of them over that year
and a half just says,” Hey, why don’t some of us just walk south until
we hit civilization and then send help?”
I have one more comparison to a recent show (and not even because it has a mostly female cast). The Yellowjackets premiere suffers from the same issue as the Y: The Last Man premiere had. Y: The Last Man was marketed as a show with one dude left in civilization, but they wasted an entire episode until finally killing off all the guys in the final moments. Similarly, we were told Yellowjackets was a survival show, but the plane does not even start going down until the last scene. Granted, while that Y: The Last Man first episode was mostly boring, I would totally watch a Friday Night Lights type show about girls’ soccer set in the nineties. But while I have compared Yellowjackets to many different shows and movies, and couple I could have also brought other like Lost (plane crash, weird stuff going on, flashback./forwards), Alive (plane crash in a remote place, possible cannibalisms), I Know What You Did Last Summer (someone seems to know what they did twenty-five years ago) Yellowjackets takes all those tropes and mixes them up into something that still manages to feel unique.
The show stars Sophie Nélisse (The Book Thief) as the straight laced member of the team (okay she
has one very dark secret) who grows up to be Melanie Lynskey (The Informant!), a bored housewife who
now has a daughter about the same age as her when she boarded the plane. Jasmin Savoy Brown (the upcoming Scream reboot) is the ruthless senior
who has no problem being hard on the underclassmen and grows up to be Tawny
Cypress (The Blacklist: Redemption) a
ruthless politician who is described as a “Queer Kamala.” Sophie Thacher (who also has the same, what I
can best described as a mullet with bang hairstyle, in another nineties set
show When the Streetlights Come On
even though I never met someone in the nineties with such a hairstyle) is the
team rebel who grows up to be Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers) who pays for that teenage rebellion by going
in and out of rehab. Sammi Hanratty (Pushing Daisies) is the over-excitable
team equipment manager who grows into Christina Ricci (Casper), a nurse with plenty of extracurricular activities. Ella Purcell (Army of the Dead) is the team’s captain, not because she is the
best player, but is a born leader. In
the future, she is played by… um, nobody.
So… I guess she does not make it out of Canada alive. Spoiler alert? Though I do have a theory about her character Jackie that I
will share on the upcoming 57 Channels
post.
The slow start in the nineties timeline which takes a whole
episode until the plane crashed is matched by a slow start to the present day
timeline. Lynskey and Cypress seemingly are
on different shows for the first couple episodes, not really tied to the plane
crash like the other modern characters are.
Sure the both receive a mysterious postcard which all the girls got
(though it is very vague who made it to present day other than those four main characters,
two of which talk about there have been no sign of the other survivors in months, though
by my count about twenty survived the crash), but after discussing with each
other once, and a reporter snoops around offering a seven figure book deal (no
one has yet to give the full story of what went on in those nineteen months) it
seems completely forgotten by those two for a while. That Ricci does not even show up until late
into the first episode also hurts that first episode.
Christina Ricci is the best thing about Yellowjackets and does a perfect grown up Tracy Flick impression (unfortunately the younger version does not; but for the younger cast, the goalkeeper is the most entertaining which tracks because you gotta be a little weird to be a goalkeeper). She is so good in this, it makes me wonder why she really has not gotten more high profile roes since her nineties child star days (well, I do know, good roles for women over twenty-five are not easy to find and Reece Witherspoon got most of them). But it is inspired casting along with another huge in the nineties actress Juliette Lewis. It is a shame they could not get Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Keri Russell, Rachel Leigh Cook, Alicia Silverstone, Tatiana Ali and / or Gabrielle Union to fill out the other adult survivors.
From the soundtrack to the return of Christina Ricci in my
life, Yellowjackets hits that nostalgia from the era much like Cruel Summer did earlier this year. The Lord
of the Flies but Ladies in the woods instead of a desert island keeps the
show entertaining past the nostalgia.
Then the mystery of who sent the postcard in the present days adds an added
layer to the show. Yellowjackets is aiming to be the next great mystery box show and almost
gets there.
Yellowjackets airs
Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime. But why wait
until Sunday for the first episode to hit linear television; you can watch it
on via Showtime website or app or on YouTube below:
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