Showtime's Yellowjackets will end after its upcoming fourth season.
Yellowjackets is noted for its split timeline, with the action unfolding simultaneously in two time periods. In 1996 an aircraft carrying a girls' high school football team crashes in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies. Although there are twenty survivors, it's a considerably smaller group who are rescued nineteen months later, leading to widespread suspicions over what they had to do in order to survive. In 2021, the now-adult survivors are reunited when they are targeted by someone threatening to expose their secrets.
The show stars Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, Sophie Nélisse, Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Liv Hewson, Steven Krueger, Warren Kole, Courtney Eaton, Sarah Desjardins, Kevin Alves, Elijah Wood and Hilary Swank, with Lauren Ambrose, Simone Kessell and Juliette Lewis having played major roles in earlier seasons.
The show has only aired three seasons - in 2021, 2023 and 2025 - but had a protracted development process, with its pilot episode written in 2017, Showtime picking it up in 2018 with casting commencing later that year, a pilot shot in 2019, and then full production delayed due to the COVID pandemic. Production of the third season was severely impacted by strike action. Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson had originally mooted a five-season run for the show, but had been wavering on that after it became clear they were struggling to get the seasons out in a reasonable timeframe, with their younger actors aging in the meantime (many of the cast playing teenagers are now in their early thirties). Fan complaints about the drawn-out pacing of the show (particularly in the adult timeline) may have also played a factor here, along with the growing cost of its star-studded cast in the adult timeline.
Showtime renewed the show for a fourth season back in May but, surprisingly, the team has not written scripts yet, suggesting that they were negotiating back and forth on whether to end the show or not. Yellowjackets has been a rare ratings hit for the cable channel but the complexities of shooting it (including depicting winter in the Canadian Rockies, which they can't shoot on location due to it being too dangerous) have been considerable and possibly unsustainable, along with its starry cast being in demand for other projects.
Yellowjackets Season 4 will enter production in early 2026 for airing late that year or in early 2027. Showtime is exploring new projects the creators, although it's unclear if they are considering spinoffs from the show.
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