Showtime developing new female thriller ‘Yellowjackets’

Showtime is currently developing the show Yellowjackets from the creators of Narcos.

Yellowjackets is the story of the Dearborn High Yellowjackets, who in 1975 qualified for the Girls U.S. Soccer Championship in New Hampshire. The Yellowjackets were never able to compete, as their plane ends up crashing somewhere in the wild of Ontario. In a story that reminds one the Donner Party, the team slowly goes from cordial to brutal tribalism.

From its premise, the show seems to be Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls, as it’s described as a smart female thriller. Funny enough, those two ideas work quite well together. They are both about degenerating into brutal conflict over power and survival, just in very different settings.

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It’s hard not to imagine that calling the team the Yellowjackets was a deliberate choice. As yellowjackets are part of the wasp family, they can sting you and turn quite nasty. That would be fitting for hinting at how vicious the team will get later on.

The show will also take a look at the lives of the survivors 25 years after the event. But of course, experiences like being stranded out in the middle of nowhere for a long length of time don’t exactly go away. They may have survived the event, now they have to live with what happened.

Calling the people who lived through the event survivors is accurate, but there is more to it than that. No one who leaves on that journey will come back. Even the survivors won’t come back, at least not as the same people who left. They will come back but as totally different people. Which is a fitting idea for a coming of age show.

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"This is an ambitious series even for Showtime to undertake, but it has a lot of potential. Shows centered on teenagers have become increasingly popular, and it’s smart to see the network commission one of their own. Are you excited about Yellowjackets? Tell us in the comments below!"