What is ITV thinking, I said to myself, in choosing to broadcast Yellowjackets — essentially a modern, female version of Lord of the Flies — at the same time BBC1 is showing, well, Lord of the Flies?

OK, they are not on at exactly the same time: one ends 15 minutes before the other starts. But I do think there is only so much “plane crashes in the wilderness and the passengers are forced to fight for their survival” content that a viewer can reasonably take in one night.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it isn’t bad timing at all but a genius piece of scheduling, with ITV aiming to inherit a chunk of the BBC’s survival-hungry audience and ride in Lord of the Flies’ slipstream. There does seem to be a lot of viewer appetite for this type of scenario.

Only a few months ago the BBC broadcast Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue in which — yet again — a small plane crashes in the Mexican jungle and, as you may have deduced from the title, quite a lot of the survivors cark it after squabbling over water and food, and one of them seems to be bumping the others off. Some bodies have their eyes eaten out by insects. Which is nice.

But I do recommend Yellowjackets. It is extremely well written and acted. You may have seen it in 2021, as did I, when it was shown on Sky Atlantic, in which case you will know that it is witty, dark, knowingly schlocky and often very, very grisly. It is multilayered, telling the story of how, after the plane carrying a US female teen soccer team (hot young athletes alert!) crashes in the Canadian wilderness, the survivors are forced to scrabble for survival for 19 months, their terrible shared secrets continuing to haunt them into a dysfunctional middle age.

At the time I called it a genre mash-up of survival drama, horror flick and teen high-school movie sprinkled with drops of The Blair Witch Project. That sounds like a total mess but, incredibly, it all works. There are bitchy fights and gruesome scenes of cannibalism. At one point a girl is suspended naked from a tree and drained of her blood before the rest all tuck in as if sharing a big, juicy doner kebab.

There are definite flaws in it. Because it straddles three timelines — the pre-crash teenage school era; the survival era, with students dressed like shamans and satanists; and the present, when they are being sent mysterious postcards threatening to expose what terrible things they did to stay alive — it can become frustrating. But unlike Lord of the Flies it does give us a strong sense of all these characters in their other life back home, so we get frequent breaks from the wilderness landscape to see them in their normal suburban existences.

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The school scenes are the least interesting yet command the most time. Easily the most entertaining timeline is the one in the present, with each of the women, now in their forties, messed up in a different way. There are excellent performances, including from Juliette Lewis, Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress and — a special treat — Christina Ricci as Misty, a sociopathic, sadistic nurse who is funny and completely terrifying.

Lynskey’s Shauna is in a stale marriage, which she tries to reignite with a sad and pitiful customer/salesman role play with her husband, who works late on his “inventory database” (ie he’s having an affair). Which, I will have to admit, you don’t get in Lord of the Flies.
★★★★☆
Available on ITVX

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