Fingers crossed the show doesn't have the infamous Sophomore Slump. New cast members include Lauren Ambrose and Elijah Wood. Showrunners envision 5 seasons, already renewed for Season 3
At first glance, the cabin seems cozy. The stone fireplace is home to the soothing crackle of flames. Lace curtains adorn frost-kissed windows. Outside, snow is falling. It really does seem cozy… if you ignore the screaming.
Beneath the frosted windows lie blood-stained sheets. Above them, an ever-growing number of antlers. And around the fireplace stands a group of teens, hand in hand, chanting: We hear the Wilderness, and It hears us. We hear the Wilderness, and It hears us. With each repetition, the words appear to gain power, and just as you think the Wilderness might respond, the director calls cut. A voice from behind the camera confirms: "Yeah, that's creepy as f---."
Yellowjackets, which follows a high school girls soccer team that's stranded in the wilderness for 19 months after their plane goes down, is in the middle of filming its highly anticipated second season (premiering March 24). It's November 2022, and the Vancouver set is every bit as ominous as you'd expect. For one thing, there's (fake) blood everywhere: in buckets, in Tupperware containers, in mugs, even on the hands of an actor who instinctively tries to shake yours before realizing. While we won't reveal what's going on during this particularly brutal day in the wilderness, it won't surprise viewers that, somehow, Misty's got blood on her glasses.
"I've become a fake blood expert," Samantha Hanratty, who plays teenage Misty, says. "It's so thick and sticky. Shaving cream is actually the best way to get it off."
When Yellowjackets premiered on Nov. 14, 2021, it didn't pull any punches. The Showtime series kicked off with a scene that made Lord of the Flies fans sit up a little straighter: one of the teenage girls running for her life before falling into a pit of spears. She's then drained of blood and eaten by her teammates.
"An early encapsulation of the idea was, 'What if the kids from Dazed and Confused became the Donner Party?'" explains Bart Nickerson, who created the series with his wife, Ashley Lyle. Nickerson says the couple has long shared a fascination with the story of the Uruguayan team from Alive. And as they worked together on Netflix's Narcos, they started talking about the many great female TV characters of the last 20 years. "So many of those stories are about being a woman in a man's world, and we wanted to try to create a story where that wasn't the point," says Lyle, who serves as co-showrunner alongside her husband and Animal Kingdom's Jonathan Lisco. "We were like, 'What if we just made a story that was about a woman's world?'"
The result is an addictively twisted mystery that spans 25 years. Because this story isn't just about the harsh reality of survival; it's also about the harsh reality of trauma. How do teenage girls become cannibals… and then how do they slip back into a normal life once they're rescued? (Or can they?) To tell the latter side of the story, the show jumps to 2021, where those same characters — or the ones who survived, at least — are now adults with careers and families. And yet, people never stop asking them about "what really happened out there."