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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
64
Mixed:
19
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Dec 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Casting here alone should win awards for capturing the essence of a decade when raw, untamed and dangerous young women surged to the forefront of music and film. Ricci (“The Ice Storm”), Lynskey (“Heavenly Creatures”) and Lewis (“Natural Born Killers”) kill in “Yellowjackets,” figuratively and literally. ... If it holds up (I’ve seen the first six episodes available for review), “Yellowjackets” may turn out to be my favorite show of 2021, even though it stretches into 2022.
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ColliderMar 16, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Although the present has yet to fully measure up to the stomach-churning storytelling of the past, Season 2 is still packed to the brim with what made the series such a buzzworthy hit in the beginning: dark comedy blended with harrowing drama, and more than enough wild reasons to keep watching.
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LooperFeb 13, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Despite the occasional meandering slowdown, "Yellowjackets" has lost none of its savage allure in Season 3. Its characters, its juicy storytelling, its violence, and its black comic heart are all still here, warm as freshly spilled blood, ready to hook us all over again. One of TV's best shows is back, and it's still a bloody great time.
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RogerEbert.comNov 12, 2021
Nov 5, 2021
Season 1 Review:
A superb Showtime thriller that riffs on Flies without repeating it. ... Yellowjackets is the rare series whose execution improves upon an already strong premise. Each episode has its puzzles and twists, just as each woman has her secrets, all set up carefully enough to make you wonder why you didn’t unravel them sooner.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
In Season 3, the action is tighter and the stakes feel higher. The writers are better at balancing reveals, twists and new questions as the plot unfolds. Plus, the stuff that's always worked for "Yellowjackets" is still there. .... "Yellowjackets" is dangerous and intoxicating again.
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Nov 11, 2021
Season 1 Review:
This is a well-filmed, original work with great production values that deftly toggles back and forth between timelines and genres (horror, teen girl drama, adult soap opera, dark comedy) and features stellar performances from the parallel casts of young actors and familiar veterans portraying characters some 25 years apart.
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Mar 17, 2023
Season 2 Review:
This group of actors are on top of their game, but part of the magic last season came from all four women interacting with one another. In Season 2, each is off on her own adventure for the bulk of the first six episodes. ... Only time will tell if some of these detours will pay off, but I'm eager to find out. It's pretty telling that even when Yellowjackets begs you to cover your eyes, it remains almost impossible to look away.
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ColliderNov 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
While the adult versions of the Yellowjackets are portrayed by an undeniable bevy of stars — Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci — the actors we follow in pivotal flashbacks to their teenage years are just as riveting to watch on-screen.
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Nov 5, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Crafting a satisfying end to such a high-concept story is extremely challenging, and it's possible that Yellowjackets could (ahem) crash and burn in the final four episodes. But if the rest of the season is as tasty as the first course, it'll be worth it to stick around for dessert.
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Nov 10, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets remains one of the fall television season’s most compelling new offerings, a twisty mystery that doesn’t easily give up many of its secrets, and grounds its story in a specifically female experience in a way that other series like this have never bothered to try.
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ColliderFeb 13, 2025
Season 3 Review:
It does take a minute for Yellowjackets Season 3 to really embrace all the best parts of itself — the parts that remind us that you can't spell the word "wilderness" without "wild," and that, sometimes, the best, twistiest mysteries are the ones that make you hunger for more.
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The GuardianFeb 13, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Yellowjackets remains witty, self-aware television. The soundtrack is great, it dares to wander off into long, hallucinogenic dream-like sequences, and you’re never quite sure who is going to make it out alive (in the present day, at least). Even if they are winging it plot-wise, it’s hard to care too much, when it’s as enjoyable as this.
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Mar 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Yellowjackets sometimes attempts so much that it trips over itself, like a fumbled fast-break play on the soccer field. But between its confident willingness to get weird — sinister trees, bloody bees, pernicious facsimiles! — and its relatively sure grip on its world-building, Yellowjackets is making a compelling case for its own longevity.
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Mar 21, 2023
Season 2 Review:
If the show explores the paranormal as thoughtfully and confidently as it does teen cannibalism and sticks the landing again in the season finale, “Yellowjackets” will vault to the top of the puzzle-box ranks. But with a show this daring, a fiery wreck always feels moments away.
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The Daily BeastMar 16, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It just lacks the assuredness of its predecessor season, trying to keep audiences on the hook with more of the same for a bit longer while it toils over what’s next. ... If it wasn’t for that wildly gripping premise and incredible cast, this might be a much more bleak winter to contend with.
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The TelegraphDec 2, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Sometimes the traversing between then and now feels too hectic. But other times you’ll be relieved to cut away from the wilderness because the scenes set there are truly unnerving. They’re also pretty high on gore, as when we see the aftermath of the crash. Throw in the suggestion of something supernatural, plus a suspected murder plot in the present day, and there’s a hell of a lot going on. But it had me gripped.
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Dec 2, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets moves with ferocious speed. It’s built on the recognizable architecture of bloody puzzle-box ancestors like Lost and The OA, but, starting with a breathless pilot directed by home-run hitter Karyn Kusama, the show cultivates an aesthetic rooted in particularities.
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Nov 15, 2021
Season 1 Review:
While Yellowjackets is far from perfect, and while it is absolutely the kind of series that will irreparably fall apart somewhere along the line (my money is on the season four premiere), I feel as jazzed by its first six episodes as I did by the first few Lost episodes back in the day.
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Nov 15, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The six episodes provided for review indicate answers won't be coming any time soon, and the invigorating performances sell the idea that delaying isn't necessarily the worst choice. But that only holds as long as the plot's rope maintains its tension even as it tosses out additional length. In the short term "Yellowjackets" holds all the essential ingredients needed to brew a thriller worth investing in.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Just how all of this devious behavior will play out is not yet clear, and it can be frustrating to get only incremental forward movement in each episode, especially as the ensemble cast keeps expanding. Even so, the performances are consistently stellar, from the veterans to the relative newcomers, and Lynskey and Ricci especially shine in the present-day scenes, bringing welcome humor to their dark, frequently amoral characters.
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Apr 7, 2023
Season 2 Review:
“Yellowjackets” has plenty of flaws, but I’m stunned, six episodes into the nine-episode second season, at the skill with which, without sacrificing the thrill of a good plot, it manages to bend genres, juggle wildly different tones and invert familiar tropes. Whether it will succeed at fully melding this wide range of registers into a coherent story remains to be seen.
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Mar 24, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The performances remain sharp and just the right amount of peculiar (Lewis is the particular highlight), but even the best of actors can’t make wheel spinning terribly interesting after a certain point. ... When Yellowjackets leans into that mysticism—evoking some kind of forest god or malevolent spirit—the show shifts into its eeriest, most alluring form. ... The ending of episode six gives me hope that the back half of the season will collect itself and drive the story forward in a confident direction.
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Nov 15, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s the kind of show that borrows from so many others that it feels mostly original again, though its most direct influence is “Lost.” ... “Yellowjackets” isn’t without its growing pains, especially in its pacing. ... The show is at its most compelling when the girls are forced to confront the unknowable inside them.
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Nov 11, 2021
Season 1 Review:
After the six episodes screened for critics, it’s not entirely clear what kind of series “Yellowjackets” is becoming. Every so often, it teases at supernatural forces behind the bloody events in the woods. ... But for now I’m willing to go along on the strength of its voice, its chaotic energy and its characters’ evolution from riot grrrls to riot women.
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Nov 5, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets starts out with a gripping pilot, directed by Karyn Kusama, and then gradually loses narrative momentum. ... But when the elements align properly — Shauna delivering a cutting monologue about what Callie’s life would be like if her parents got divorced, or the show’s expertly-timed deployment of classic Nineties songs by Liz Phair, the Cranberries, Wilson Phillips, and more — it’s easy to experience a rush of adrenaline.
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TV Guide MagazineNov 5, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets is a luridly intriguing melodrama. [8 - 21 Nov 2021, p.8]
IndieWireMar 16, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Season 2 keeps moving forward… but the giddy buzz once driving “Yellowjackets” has been replaced by a snail’s pace. Through six episodes, Season 2 appears to be approaching aptly complex quandaries for its core cast members, but the path to their confrontation is padded in too much snow.
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The PlaylistNov 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
While ‘Yellowjackets’ features strong performances from its leads and poses intriguing questions about human nature pushed to extremes, ultimately it feels crowded with too many plot points and characters. I’m hooked enough to want to find out what happens to them all in the latter half of the season, but I can’t help but think it would be stronger if the cast were pruned by half.
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Feb 20, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Yellowjackets has replaced some of its broader accessibility with a knotty, indulgent story—and a level of absurdity that would seem ridiculous were it not for the torment its characters have already suffered. The show has always explored hive-mind delusions, but Season 3 renders its ensemble numb to logic in the face of inexplicable occurrences.
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Sep 4, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Regrettably, that rule still remains one of the few clear things about the darkly delightful “Yellowjackets,” as Season 3 continues the series’ frustrating habit of spooling out seemingly endless new mysteries without providing answers to the creepy mythology at its core.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
While it’s admirable to try to serve the sprawling cast by providing separate arcs for Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Tawny Cypress, Yellowjackets forgets that a major appeal of this ensemble is what its members get up to together. .... When co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and the rest of their creative team home in on what makes these girls and women tick, maneuvering the characters to reflect the thin line between civility and the feral, Yellowjackets is luscious, immersive, and barbed.
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Feb 14, 2025
Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The adult half of the saga remains too scattered to gain much momentum. The teenage half is more cohesive .... With six episodes still left, there’s plenty of time for the show to swerve into new heights or disappointing dead ends or the vast middle ground in between. But it’s odd that nearly halfway through the season, we seem to still be in the setup phase.
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Nov 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Any attempts to connect the past and present versions of the characters are stymied by the gaping hole in the middle, which after six episodes is still filled only with promises that some future twist will explain everything. The series feels so stuck on the question of what happened that it can’t even begin to think about what it might mean. ... Yellowjackets remains too fun to write off just yet. Its gutsiness sets it apart from the usual survival-drama fare, and its performances suggest a deeper story even if we don’t know what it is quite yet.
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Nov 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets is promising if inessential. Its characters are archetypes, which would be more forgivable in a show that isn't quite so derivative. Regardless, reliable performers like Lynskey and Ricci can't lead us too far astray, and there are enough tantalizing building blocks to ensure the series doesn't crash-land.
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Feb 18, 2025
Season 3 Review:
“Yellowjackets” isn’t quite one show but several of inconsistent quality joined by the flimsy glue of lingering questions that don’t seem all that complicated. What is “it” — “it” being the supposed wilderness terror – and what does “it” want decades after the teens left it? You, the loyal fans, can sit tight and ponder all that for as long as it appeals to you. And me? Um, I gotta go . . . do something.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The grown women are still scattered to the four winds, with most attempts to pair them off feeling forced, and they still lack an imperative as urgent as their younger selves’ need to stay alive. .... The paranoia, occult inclinations and regular old teen drama form a combustible powder keg that delivers some of the series’ best scenes to date.
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Feb 13, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Yellowjackets has lost much of its buzz in season 3. While the actors in both timelines are doing their best, the material they’re given doesn’t meet the high standard of quality set by season 1. The lack of connection between the actions of the characters in 1996 and their impact on their 2021 selves also makes the parallel storylines feel so distant as to not even matter anymore.
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Mar 24, 2023
Season 2 Review:
If you are among those passengers who boarded Showtime’s mystery “Yellowjackets” and couldn’t get enough of it, fasten your seat belts for more turbulence in Season 2. As for others unmoved by the slow pace of revelations in the twin-track drama, the first four episodes offer little hope of reaching a clear destination anytime soon.
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Mar 21, 2023
Season 2 Review:
There are so many things happening in Yellowjackets at all times that it’s never completely clear which aspects are the distracting sleight of hand and which are the actual magic trick. It’s not mechanically sound, but Yellowjackets is still moving forward. For now.
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Nov 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Yellowjackets looked promising thanks to the casting and concept, but the Showtime series feels like a disappointment in terms of shaping its twin-track plot into an equally compelling drama. The stars still merit a look, but the episodes made available don't provide much incentive for those watching the takeoff to stick around for the landing.
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