Development Notes: The Wilds vs. Yellowjackets
One of my favorite things ever is when two movies or shows with the exact same premise come out. My appetite for it was unleashed back in 2019 with the surprise release of two competing Fyre Festival documentaries – Fyre Fraud on Hulu and Fyre on Netflix. It was a delicious moment in the ongoing Battle of the Streamers (as Hulu beat Netflix to the jump and dropped their documentary four days before Netflix’s was set to release), but it also made a fascinating case study – which creative team told the story better? Critics agreed that Fyre was better, as it focused on the impact the festival had on the local community, while Fyre Fraud focused on the role of social media in the fiasco. Fyre goes deeper and more human, and that’s ultimately the more successful route. It’s a great story lesson for all writers and creatives out there.
One of the best recent examples I’ve found has been Yellowjackets – my latest obsession thanks to a newly acquired Showtime subscription! – and The Wilds. Both begin with the same hook: a plane full of teenage girls crashes in the wilderness, leaving the survivors stranded. How will the girls survive and who will they become in the process? The two shows are similar in a lot of ways, but are ultimately radically different, and only one’s still on air. If you were a development executive who received pitches for both, which would you choose?
HOW THEY’RE SIMILAR
Conceptually and commercially, both shows are playing with a similar set of narrative pieces. The plane crash hook in both works because it presents an interesting, saleable idea: what would Lord of the Flies look like if it centered on female teenagers rather than male ones? Would they create a loving, warm, girl-power community? (Spoiler alert: no.) Or would their conflict and struggle rival the savagery of the Lord of the Flies boys? (Spoiler alert: yes!)
By nature, both shows feature a young female cast, aiming to appeal to a young female audience. Structurally, both also rely on flashbacks, which dovetails nicely with the greater themes inherent to both stories, showing how the experience forever changes the girls involved. Both also currently have two seasons.
HOW THEY’RE DIFFERENT
From here, The Wilds and Yellowjackets differ in four key ways.
The first fork in the road comes with an early development question fundamental to both of their stories – did the plane crash on accident, or on purpose?
The Wilds goes with the more immediately shocking answer: the plane crashed on purpose. This choice lends itself to the YA genre, in which an evil oppressive outside force is almost a given (think The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner), narrowing the target audience to young adult viewers, marking a second creative fork. We come to learn that the girls have been placed on an isolated island by the leader of the very empowerment program they’d been flying to attend – a woman herself, who wants to prove to the world that women are as capable of leading societies as men. This premise is a stretch, and the writers smartly lean into this by crafting the show as a drama-comedy, marking genre as the third major creative difference between the shows.
In contrast, Yellowjackets takes the more realistic initial fork in the road: the plane crash was an accident. This choice lends itself to weightier, darker themes, paving the way for attracting both YA and adult audiences. While tension in The Wilds arises from the girls being trapped in a social experiment and controlled from afar, tension in Yellowjackets arises from the darkness that erupts in the girls when they’re truly on their own, with death lurking around every corner. Cut loose from the bounds of traditional society, a much darker one rises in its place between the girls, a thematic throughline that the writers underline by embracing a drama-horror genre.
The fourth major difference comes with how both shows utilize structure.
Episodically, The Wilds utilizes a tried-and-true TV formula, in which the B story of every episode follows a pre-inciting incident flashback of a different member of the central cast, which runs parallel to the primary A story. The show also utilizes flashforwards, where we see the girls being interviewed directly after their rescue, a device that quickly becomes a double-edged sword – it’s a great way to sprinkle in foreshadowing, but it also tells the audience that the Lord of the Flies conceit ends fairly quickly, taking some of the wind out of the show’s narrative sails. Seasonally, the writers ultimately seemed to back themselves into a narrative corner, and expanded the premise in season two by following the progression of a parallel boy’s program – essentially repeating season one, just with male characters. To me, this destroyed the show’s premise – I mean, what happened to “being a teenage girl, that was the real living hell?” The show’s focus on the complex inner lives of female characters was a big part of the draw.
Yellowjackets takes a different approach. In each episode, we follow both the progression of the girls being marooned in the mid-1990s and their history coming back to haunt them as adults in 2021. It’s a genius way to give both A and B stories equal narrative weight, and to obfuscate how long the girls are stranded. With this construction, each season winds tighter and tighter as we get deeper into the story of what happened to the girls in the wilderness, and see the increasingly surreal ripple effects of the misadventure on the girls as adults. Once they experience the death of society, there is no returning to a normal life – the wilderness sticks with them, a specter shadowing their every move. This builds to a culmination at the end of season two, when the girls are reunited as adult women, and they hunt one of their own through the forest. It’s a brilliant thematic escalation of the Lord of the Flies ending – what happens when the adults are the ones doing the hunting, and there’s no one left to break the spell and stop the bloodshed?
Ultimately, Yellowjackets is the stronger, more narratively sustainable show, and it was renewed for season three, while The Wilds was canceled after season two. There are definitely confounding variables here, as each streaming service has different mandates, ideal audiences, and budgets, but if I had been pitched both shows as a TV executive, I would have gone for Yellowjackets in a heartbeat.
Interested in more same-concept movies/shows? Check out the trailers for Totally Killer, released on Amazon last year, and Time Cut, released on Netflix last month. Which one would you watch?