Yellowjackets Season 1 is the complicated depiction of women you're sorely missing

What do you get when you mix a high school girls' soccer team, a plane crash and a deadly, potentially supernatural cult? A breakthrough TV show and a highly anticipated second season. I, like many others, waited patiently for creative couple Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson to announce a followup to the first season of their campy Showtime horror-drama, Yellowjackets. But I'm not here to talk Season 2 (which debuts March 24); I'm recommending watching, and even rewatching, Season 1 in all its femme-forward gore and glory. 

The buzz has probably already piqued your interest if you haven't watched yet, and the show's amateur sleuth plot provides plenty of details to catch that make a second viewing more than worthwhile. Beyond that though, whether you've already seen the first season or not, watch it for the sheer catharsis that comes from seeing complex female characters, free from stereotypical romantic or family worries, dealing with extreme circumstances and discovering their mettle. 

Fresh — and deeply frightening

Though it gleans inspiration from many sources, Yellowjackets's first season is a beast all its own, mashing up archetypes of natural-born leaders, caregivers and outcast nerds, action sparked by the darkest of human instincts, and music from the '90s to spit out something that felt new — and that I didn't realize I needed until my eyes were glued to the screen. There, depictions of femaleness were so far-reaching as to be outrageous, testing my limits of acceptability with each fresh horrifying event. 

Often compared to Lord of the Flies, with a heavy pour of Mean Girls and a smattering of Columbo-gone-wrong, this show is also inspired by the real-life 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes after which a team of rugby players infamously resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Only in this version of the wilderness-stranded, survival-of-the-fittest story, it's a girl's world. The New Jersey–based soccer squad's plane crashes in the Canadian hinterland on the way to a national tournament in Seattle, and the ones who don't die in the accident are left to figure out how to survive being cut off from the world for 19 months.

Moral challenge

We get hints from the opening scene of what the girls did to get out alive (so I'm not spoiling anything here — or anywhere), with snippets of cult-inspired bacchanales centered around cannibalistic feasting. That's the visceral thread that's woven through the show, from the predominantly female group's shocking stint in the forest smash cut to their present in 2021, when their middle-aged selves try to move on as best they can. The ones who survive the crash live through the true horror: a trauma that almost becomes a character, made up of all the ghosts of those who were lost. 

In the dire environment of the woods, the characters' complexities bust out into full view, testing viewers to the extreme. The horrible things they do with no one watching make us think, "I'd never do that," but that forces us to look at their more "everyday" reprehensible actions in comparison. After all, what's a little boyfriend-related backstabbing compared to, oh, eating your friend? These girls were far from perfect long before they got stranded in the woods and their teammates started looking tasty. Pre-crash distress trickles into the lead girls' plot lines, making them relatable and likeable — even after hunger sets in. 

Cliché-free catharsis

With its themes of survival, fraught inter-player dynamics and queer romance, the show breezes past the Bechdel test (which asks whether a work of fiction showcases at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man). In fact, Yellowjackets has only a few secondary male characters, including the soccer coach gravely hurt in the crash — and his injuries leave him dependent on Misty, a manipulative outcast with sharp survival skills.

As the characters are allowed to do many things to survive — to plunge into the shadows, to act out of need and be disgusted by it — viewers, by extension, are allowed a broad spectrum of feelings in observing them. That freedom to like the unlikeable, to root for female characters who have done awful things (in and out of the woods) brought me catharsis, since that sort of moral relativism is a privilege we usually reserve for males. The characters never shy away from their darkness in desperate situations, allowing the spectrum of "acceptable" actions to become elastic. 

Much of the action takes place in 1996, the year the Spice Girls burst onto the scene with their neatly categorized femininity, and Yellowjackets's characters might initially seem just as easy to define, both in their youth and as adults (Bored Mom Spice, Political Spice ... with an Omniscient Ghost Spice forcing them all together). But if the show entertains clichés, it's to eventually smash them. As younger women they suffer familiar harms — like having "slut" hurled at them, having their experiences discredited and their sanity questioned, and witnessing minor male successes celebrated over major female ones — but their resulting frustrations, pains and insecurities are given free rein out in the woods. As mothers and caregivers in their forties, their choices are complicated by their circumstances, not consigned by them.

So many other aspects of the first season set it apart. These characters certainly don't fetishize their childhoods, and despite their strength, their dysfunctions mean they're portrayed as anything but superwomen. Ultimately, the viewer is asked to reconsider our still-strong obsession with the idea of "sweet 16," our insistence that women can and should want to have it all, and why we uphold the line between good and bad so firmly. What's more, rather than sugary sweet depictions of female friendship, theirs are frayed by time and circumstance. So though Yellowjackets is about middle-of-nowhere, shadow-laden, bloody survivalism, the characters and how they deal with their relationships and traumas feel refreshingly real — teeth, claws and all.