It is not easy to deliver big with a sophomore season when you’ve set the bar so astronomically high for yourselves with your debut. That’s the exact position Yellowjackets showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and Jonathan Lisco put themselves in. But, it seems as though they found the ideal blend of having a strong roadmap but being willing to adapt when unexpected opportunities arise because Yellowjackets Season 2 soars in some mighty satisfying ways, but also in ways I never saw coming.

In Season 2, the 1996 timeline kicks off about two months after Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) death. It’s winter, there’s little to no food left, and the Yellowjackets are starting to succumb to darker impulses. Meanwhile, in the present-day timeline, everyone’s scattered. Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) just been kidnapped, Misty’s (Christina Ricci) busy looking for her, Taissa’s (Tawny Cypress) struggling to deal with more frequent visits from “the other,” and Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is trying to keep the cops from finding out she killed Adam (Peter Gadiot). On top of all of that, Lottie (Simone Kessell) is back in the picture.
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How’s that for a massive list of storylines to service? There’s no denying it’s a lot, but Lyle, Nickerson, Lisco, and their writing team make it work exceptionally well, building on themes and ideas established in Season 1 while finding new corners to explore in the second season.

With Yellowjackets Season 2, Episode 1 now available to stream on Showtime and set to air on Sunday, March 26th, I got the chance to sit down with the trio for an extended interview — half for non-spoiler conversation and then the other half to dig into Season 2 spoilers. Of course, this right here is the non-spoiler portion covering what inspired them to pivot and make Liv Hewson’s Van a bigger part of the series, why they had to assuage Warren Kole’s concerns about Jeff’s role in Shauna’s storyline, and how they incorporated a couple of new Yellowjackets even though, technically, they should have been there all along.

You can hear about that and loads more in the video interview at the top of this article, or you can read about it in the transcript below.

Image via Showtime

You probably know this; I’ve read a whole lot about your five-season plan, but I know that plans do evolve as you make a show and you hear the response to the season that you just shot. What would you say changed the most given your experience shooting Season 1, and then also how people reacted to the material in the finished product?

BART NICKERSON: I don’t know if this is lame, but there is a part of me that doesn’t want to answer because I hate the idea of somebody in the audience feeling like the thing that they got wasn’t somehow whole. In my mind, there are lots of changes, big and small, that happen as part of this process and it’s one of the best parts of the process, but I guess I tend to think of it like, ‘Well, that’s the way it was always supposed to be.’ It’s not that we couldn’t get the thing or this didn’t work out; it’s just that’s not what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be this.

JONATHAN LISCO: I’m with you, Bart. Some years ago I think there was an experiment in Hollywood where people could choose their own adventure. There was a play running called Shear Madness where you got to choose the ending, and they sort of found out that it really didn’t work because people wanted to be grabbed by the lapels and taken through a story that they felt was really cohesive. And so, I’ll answer for myself, the audience reaction, we’re so grateful for it and it’s so meaningful to us, but we can’t let it affect too much [of] our process in the writers room. We must trust our own impulses. And as we start herding the cats, metaphorically speaking, of our writers, and brainstorming and blue skying, things start to emerge that just instinctively feel right to us. And so I’m not saying we ignore audience feedback. Of course, it’s really interesting and meaningful to us. But at the same time, we’ve got to keep the integrity of the story that we’re telling, and try and not allow that to affect us too much, because then it becomes sort of like a slightly impure process.

Audience reaction aside, is there anything that instinctively emerged via the making of Season 1 where you discovered that there was more to something than you ever realized was there originally and you got to expand upon that in Season 2?

ASHLEY LYLE: I think that there were a few things that we always hoped we could do, but Season 1 gave us the confidence to dig deeper into. I think a great example is the family dynamic amongst the Sadeckis because Warren Kole and Sarah Desjardins are both incredible, and had we not gotten so incredibly lucky with their casting, I don’t know that we would have been able to explore as deeply. But because they were both so great in Season 1, we were like, ‘Well, let’s go for it. Let’s really expand on this.’ We always knew that Shauna’s relationship to her daughter and her relationship to motherhood was gonna be a big deal, but knowing that we have such an incredible game actor in Sarah allowed us to just give her more to do.

Image via Showtime

LISCO: I would add that when Warren came on and he did such a great job portraying Jeff, you know, Jeff could have just been the schlubby accessory to Shauna’s storyline and the husband that was used as the butt of the joke, but in fact, what wound up happening because of their chemistry and we hope because of the writing, we start to root for them. And they’re a very grounded, meaningful couple to our audience now, and that is such a pleasure, so we get to explore where they can go from here.

LYLE: And Warren took a real leap of faith with us because we knew that early on we wanted to pull a little bit of a bait and switch with Jeff. We introduced him in the pilot as a teenager and he is kind of an idiot. Then when we first introduce him, it’s clear that this is a marriage that kind of came from more of a place of guilt and sort of self-justification for what Shauna had done than true love, but we kept trying to essentially assure Warren, because again, I think that he was maybe rightfully concerned for a little bit that he was just kind of the doofy husband, and we were like, ‘You gotta go with us, Warren. We will earn this back.’ And we talked about it a lot in the room. And we were just like, ‘We’re gonna win people over to Jeff. That is our goal. And if we don’t succeed, then we have not done our jobs correctly.’

You know who else everyone really likes? Van! And I might have seen some quotes floating around that originally you were planning to kill off Van in Season 1.

LISCO: 100%. Yes.

When and how was that character originally going to die, and now moving forward, what corners are you able to explore specifically because that character is back in the equation here?

LYLE: I think what’s interesting is that it’s not that she was ever definitely meant to die, it’s just that the opportunity for her death kept coming up and then we kept writing away from it. And I think part of that is very much a credit to Liv because they are phenomenal. And even in the pilot itself, Van was not given a particularly big part and Liv found some great moments. Some of them were scripted, but some of them are improvved. I think one of my favorite things that Van does in the pilot, and this was all Liv, as Jackie’s saying, ‘Yellowjackets with me,’ and is about to give them a talking to, Liv decided to just go back and get a little bit more beer and we were like, that is such an incredible Van character moment. The more fun these characters are, the harder it is to part with them. The one who was legitimately going to die in the pilot from our conception and our pitch was Laura Lee, and Jane [Widdop] brought so much humanity to that part that we were like, ‘Okay, well, we have to kill somebody at some point.’ [Laughs]

Image via Showtime

LISCO: And it was really hard. In a lot of ways, Jane made it a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are so good. We didn’t kill them at that point, what Ashley just referred to, but because they were so good in the course of the season, we thought that that would be a very meaningful character death, and we decided to go for it in Episode 8 last season.

LYLE: And so RIP, Rachel. Rachel became the Laura Lee. [Laughs]

[Laughs] What smart ways to pivot and recognize the talent that you have!

How do you figure out how to incorporate Yellowjackets that technically weren’t there all along, but now you’re presenting them as characters that we need to believe had been there the entire time? I was surprised by how quickly I fell into step with that group.

NICKERSON: I think that part of it is, you know, a television is not a novel or a feature. You don’t have the entire plan, for better and for worse. I’m sure that this is an extreme statement that I will back away from ten minutes after this interview is over, but leaning into the realities of the medium that you’re working in, whether it’s a limit or an expansiveness of it, I think is almost always the right answer. And so just to acknowledge that it’s like, ‘Okay, we can’t cast all of these people in two timelines right from day one. That’s just not financially viable.’ But then doing it in a way that’s not trying to pull a fast one, that is trying to be as non-bumpy as possible, but also says, ‘No, no, no. We kind of know we’re not getting one by you,’ just seems to be the best way to proceed.

Don’t regret saying that. I feel like it’s well worth talking about balancing the business with the art because that’s a really important part of finding success here.

LYLE: Production reality, and I think that some of our audience is savvy to that and some are less so because how could they be? They’re not in the business. But the fact is that, one, in Season 1 we were dealing with COVID, which meant we had to have smaller sets. And we did make it difficult for ourselves because of the isolation of the cabin. We knew that there were going to be other characters, but you can’t cast somebody phenomenal and then give them one line or two every once in a while, so we knew that we were gonna have to play it this way. Hopefully people go with it. And we got very lucky also in that Mya Lowe who plays Gen was around first season and really impressed us. One of our first instincts in Season 2 was as opposed to recasting all those parts, we thought, ‘You know, Mya was great. Let’s bring Mya in and see what she can do.’ And it turns out, she can do a lot. So that worked out really well. But yeah, it really is just a casting reality. If you know that you’re not going to be able to truly develop those characters until later, you really can’t cast it until you can.

Image via Showtime

LISCO: And you really want to get the audience leaning in on the main core group first before you do sort of like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and their point of view. So once we decided that now they’re invested in our main characters, then you could really ask the question of like, ‘Well, what are the other girls thinking about what’s happening in our storyline?’ And so, that’s the Crystal storyline that we now excavate this season. I think you let the story lead you into what you need.

LYLE: And the fact is is that at that age, there are cliques and there are hierarchies. There are plenty of people that I went to high school with that I barely interacted with and vice versa, you know? [Laughs] So it actually makes a certain amount of sense. Obviously, because of the size of the cabin and where we are it makes it a little bit trickier. And yeah, I think that what was really fun was starting to see some personalities outside of our core group. There are a couple of moments where Jenna [Burgess] who plays Melissa just nailed a couple of lines. It’s like, she’s really funny. This is great! And then we all kind of fell in love in the writers room with Crystal pretty early on.