If there’s anything more horrifying than being a teenage girl stuck in a hormonal body and a socially treacherous high school, it’s being a teenage girl stuck in a hormonal body and the Canadian wilderness as winter approaches, food dwindles, and your fellow teenage girl companions are growing increasingly hungry and restless.
That’s the topline selling point of “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime drama about a New Jersey state champion girls’ soccer team who have to survive 19 months in the Ontario forest after their plane crashes en route to nationals. The show, which opens with a nightmarish sequence in which a girl is killed, butchered, and eaten by people draped in animal skins, became an unexpected smash hit this winter. But, as Emma argued in a fantastic MSNBC essay, “Yellowjackets” used teen girl cannibalism as a hook for a show that, in its first season, offered very little cannibalism — and much more meat.
The show unfolds as two parallel narratives: in…
