A dog’s breakfast but I’m rather enjoying it: Sky Atlantic’s Yellowjackets reviewed

It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the Flies horror scenario, perhaps including cannibalism and ritualistic tribal sacrifice. All of which might explain why the forty-something women we meet today are so raddled, bitter, secretive, paranoid and messed up.

Perhaps the biggest red flag is the dread memories it invokes of Lost, the plane crash TV series that ran in the Noughties for six seasons but still left you none the wiser as to why you’d bothered watching because none of its mysteries was ever satisfyingly resolved. I really hate being strung along to no purpose, which is why I’m hesitant about committing to that BBC series The Tourist about a man who wakes up from a coma after a Duel-like encounter in the Australian outback with a malevolent trucker. You kind of know that whatever the explanation it’s going to be frustrating and bathetic, and that before you get there there’s going to be an awful lot of meandering, quirky ballroom dancing and red herrings.

At ten hour-long episodes, Yellowjackets is quite a commitment and potentially allows screenwriters Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle far too much space for padding. On the upside, though, their previous work includes the excellent Narcos, and they’ve bagged a fine cast of ‘whatever happened to…?’ starlets who were big in the 1990s led by Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Melanie Lynskey (from Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures).

Anyway, two episodes in I’m rather enjoying it.