The Gray Area with Sean Illing

A Yellowjackets creator spills his guts

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Vox's Constance Grady talks with Bart Nickerson, the co-creator of new TV show Yellowjackets, which airs on Showtime. Yellowjackets follows a girls' soccer team, stranded in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 as teenagers — and also the present-day middle-aged women that some of the survivors become. Bart and Constance discuss the role of trauma on television, the process of crafting characters across two timelines, and why the struggle for survival (and cannibalism) fits a story about adolescence.

Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, Vox

Guests: Bart Nickerson, co-creator (with Ashley Lyle) of Yellowjackets on Showtime

References: 

  • "The Case Against the Trauma Plot" by Parul Sehgal (New Yorker; Dec. 27, 2021)
  • "Too many movies right now are 'about trauma.' The Matrix Resurrections actually does the work," by Emily VanDerWerff (Vox; Dec. 24, 2021)
  • "Yellowjackets is prestige Pretty Little Liars. Hear me out," by Constance Grady (Vox; Jan. 7)
  • "Yellowjackets brilliantly mixes teen angst, cannibalism, and midlife crises — with major Lost vibes" by Emily VanDerWerff (Vox; Nov. 12, 2021)
  • "The slippery genius of the Cinderella story" by Constance Grady (Vox; June 5, 2019)
  • "'Yellowjackets' Leans In to Savagery" by Alexis Soloski (New York Times; Nov. 12, 2021)


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    This episode was made by: 

    • Producer: Erikk Geannikis
    • Editor: Amy Drozdowska
    • Engineer: Paul Robert Mounsey
    • Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall

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