The woods half of Yellowjackets is tense, funny and frightening, and it is what Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle do best. The suburban half, run alongside it, is a thinner show they have never quite admitted is thinner.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in nearly every woods episode of Yellowjackets a girl says something funny, and a moment later you remember where she is. That is the show's habit and, as far as an outsider can tell, Nickerson's: the fright and the joke in the same breath, the joke arriving first. He and Ashley Lyle, his writing partner and wife, tell each other in the writers' room that the series is a comedy, of the darkest kind, and the odd thing is that they are right. A New Jersey girls' soccer team goes down in the mountains in 1996, not all of them come home, and the survivors spend twenty-five years lying about it in the suburbs. We were frightened by the woods, then we laughed, then we felt slightly bad about laughing, and the laugh is what brought us back.
The career before it was a writers'-room career, and there is no shame in that. Nickerson moved to Los Angeles in 2007; his first sustained job was on The Originals (2013), where he wrote eleven episodes across three seasons. He wrote for Narcos in 2017 and Narcos: Mexico in 2018, then for Dispatches from Elsewhere in 2020. We liked Narcos well enough, and we could not tell you which of its sentences were his, which is what a room job is for. Yellowjackets, created with Lyle in 2021 and reaching a fourth and final season in 2026, is the first place the voice is plainly theirs.
The two timelines were in the pitch from the beginning, and Lyle and Nickerson talk about them as two connected shows with their own demands. That is exactly the problem. The woods show has the tension, the jokes and the fear; the suburban show, as we said when we reviewed it, is thinner and is carried by better actors, and the series has never quite admitted the difference. Two shows running side by side is a fine idea for a pitch and a hard one to sustain, because one of them will always be the show you would rather be watching.
Lyle credits Nickerson with the pair's visual sense. He paints and draws, takes point on colour correction, and has directed episodes himself, which for a writer who came up through other people's rooms is a sensible way of making sure the pictures match the pages. The partnership is the other thing worth naming. Lyle and Nickerson write as one, with Jonathan Lisco alongside them as co-showrunner, and it is a reasonable guess that two people checking every line is why the jokes and the fear so rarely cancel each other out.
The series ends in 2026, and the question is what two writers who have done their best work running two shows at once will do with a single timeline. On the evidence, they should pick the frightening one.
Biography
Bart Nickerson is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He co-created the Showtime series Yellowjackets (2021–) with his wife Ashley Lyle, on which he has also written and directed episodes.
He began his television career writing for The Originals (2013–2016). Subsequent credits include writing for Narcos (2015), Narcos: Mexico (2018) and Dispatches from Elsewhere (2020). Nickerson and Lyle met in 2005 and moved to Los Angeles in 2007.
