Four years ago, Ashley Lyle read an article in the trades about a planned remake of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” the 1954 boys-gone-wild classic about prep school lads stranded on an island.
Set in 1996 and in the present, “Yellowjackets,” which premieres Sunday on Showtime, follows a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes en route to a tournament.
Trafficking in cannibalism, ritual murder, improvised surgery, insanity in manifold forms and yes, poisoned food, it argues for the savagery of girlhood — with or without an aviation disaster — and how that savagery reverberates throughout women’s lives.
A template of reality television shows like “Survivor” , it also informs fictional series like “The Walking Dead,” “Under the Dome,” “The 100,” “Falling Skies,” “Survivors” and more.
“The Wilds,” a plane crash survivalist drama that debuted last year on Amazon, resembles “Yellowjackets” closely, though with less compelling characters and fewer bonkers plot twists.
Loosely inspired by the 1972 Andes Flight Disaster, which also yielded the cute-boys-turn-to-cannibalism film “Alive,” from 1993, “Yellowjackets” sits at the crux of these concerns.
After a cold open — a young woman in a nightgown runs through the snow on bleeding feet, then meets a bloodier end — “Yellowjackets” flashes back to show the girls before the crash, yelping as they win the New Jersey state championship.
The actual plane crash functions as both a necessary plot point and a loose metaphor for the ways in which growing up as a woman can already feel like a catastrophe.
In terms of production design, the 2021 world doesn’t look much different from the 1996 one, a way to evoke the lingering effects of the past.
For the 2021 sequences, “Yellowjackets” cast several actresses — Juliette Lewis — who shot to fame in the ’90s and are still picking out some of that shrapnel now.
That shared experience informed the characters and created close ties among the older actresses.
Those bonds grew tight.
To create a sense of intergenerational consistency, the older and younger actors would have conversations about posture, gesture, personality, tone of voice.
To help color in that page, Lewis made Thatcher playlists that leaned heavily on era-defining acts like Hole and PJ Harvey.
For Lyle and for others, it was mildly troubling to see their ’90s youth reconstructed as period drama.
All of the older actresses mentioned the excitement and relief they felt in playing characters who would never reasonably be described as likable.
It is cleareyed about both the havoc of girlhood and the depredations of middle age, sympathizing with its characters without making any of them especially good or nice.