It’s 2023, and I’m finally catching up on the horror TV landscape. First, I watch a show that has had a lot of buzz online:Yellowjackets (2021), the story of a girls’ soccer team surviving in the Canadian Rockies after a plane crash. When I started watching it, it had quite a lot of acclaim; even now, it still has 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I expected something pretty special. Then, with a great degree more skepticism, I also watch Interview with the Vampire (2022) (which, for my sanity, I will refer to as IWTV hereafter), a show I had barely heard anything about but that one friend had been begging me to watch.

I enjoyed the first season of both shows enough to want to watch a second season. I could tell that I preferred IWTV, but I didn’t realize the extent of this until it came to the prospect of watching season 3. By the time the final episode of season 2 of IWTV dropped, I was already Googling “IWTV season 3 release date.” Meanwhile, with Yellowjackets, I ended up dropping off two episodes before the end of season 2, realizing that my enjoyment had completely shriveled. 

I’m a completionist by nature, so it’s rare for me to give up on a story before it’s done. I found myself wondering why Yellowjackets had lost me. Was it a bad second season? That didn’t seem right, because there wasn’t anything in the second season that stood out as particularly different from the first. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I found my distaste leaking backwards into the first season, into the very pilot, until I found myself no longer able to say I liked the show. But, that also felt wrong, a rewriting of history. I remember devouring Yellowjackets season 1, grateful that I’d delayed watching it long enough that all the episodes were out and I could just binge them.

No one can deny that Yellowjackets has a strong script. It hits all the beats needed to keep the audience hooked, balancing intrigue, violence, taboo, and tension so that even as something is happening, there’s also something else due to happen on the horizon. The mystery is multilayered and complex, meaning there’s always a question for the viewer to mull over. However, it is precisely this regimented, engaging structure that eventually lost me. It occurred to me, after thinking about what I liked about ITWV, that my problem came down to a difference between a good story, and good TV writing. 

Note: The following article contains spoilers for the pilot episodes of Yellowjackets and IWTV. Otherwise, I tried my best to keep the analysis spoiler-free.

Writing a theme park: Entertainment isn’t story

Despite being different genres of horror, with vastly different casts, Yellowjackets and IWTV have a lot in common: both tell dual timeline narratives that flip between our characters undergoing brutality in their past and litigating it in the present. Both have themes of consumption and hunger, exploring the isolation of having undergone something that no one could possibly understand. At least, no one other than your fellow victims who may or may not be perpetrators of the suffering themself. The hyperviolence in both shows is metered out in small but brutal doses, and the narrative is filtered through a lens of ambiguity, relying on narrators with limited reliability.

But, where these various parts of IWTV seem to interconnect, in Yellowjackets, they feel like ingredients designed to keep you hooked: the MSG in the pack of Doritos. I have a friend who describes the food in the Costco food court as perfectly engineered to be good (not great), hitting all the notes it’s meant to in the exact way you’d expect because anything riskier might alienate a shopper. Yellowjackets feels a little like a Costco pizza slice. Even in positive reviews of the show, I can’t help but see a focus on how the story is good because it keeps the viewer hooked:

“The series isn’t just for teens; it features a large cast showcasing two timelines… Themes of love, loss, and murder permeate both timelines, ensuring plenty to keep you engaged.”

Madison DeVito,  Showtime’s “Yellowjackets”: A Season One Review: What to Watch When You Need an Escape

Martin Scorsese pissed off many a Marvel fan by telling Empire magazine that he considered Marvel movies not cinema but “theme parks.” While I understand how that can come across as elitist (oh, just because something is fun and popular, it isn’t “art”?), I also understand where he’s coming from. 

Earlier Marvel movies like the first Iron Man (2008) film or the Toby Maguire Spiderman trilogy (2002-2007) (yes, all three; I’m taking no notes at this time) felt like they had stories to tell, themes to explore. They drew you in; they built around character. (Most) post-Avengers Marvel movies feel more like a spectacle. Like a theme park, they’re fun while you’re there, and you’d be happy going back, but they don’t linger in your psyche. 

This isn’t something inherent to superhero stories, or even to that era of Marvel. For example, I adored Wandavision for the way it brilliantly connects its comic book story to themes of grief, loss, and denial. But, it’s a rare gem from this era. As superhero movies proved to executives that they could draw crowds, the writing seemed to shift focus onto “how do we keep them (and their wallets) coming back for more?” CJ the X explores this phenomenon in No Way Home Was Kind of Sexist, comparing how Into the Spiderverse used the multiverse to explore themes of identity and duty, while No Way Home primarily used the multiverse for fan service and entertainment. Ultimately, both are fun movies (CJ concludes the same), but it’s Into the Spiderverse that sticks with me.

“Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption.” 

Martin Scorsese, I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain

With the rise of prestige TV came respect for the genre as a format, with which came the study of what works and what doesn’t. Over time, this led to rules for what good TV writing was: how to structure stories, where to weave A and B plots, how to construct a compelling cliffhanger. There’s a lot of “good” television that adheres to these rules. But stories are more than just their most optimized form. In fact, part of what made IWTV feel fresh is the way it breaks with the perfected formula. 

“Save the cat” and other rules of “good” screenwriting

In 2005, Blake Snyder wrote Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, and it’s all been downhill since.

No, I’m kidding. Snyder’s book on screenwriting guidance (aimed at movies, but eventually expanded by others to mediums such as TV) isn’t “the end of good writing.” In fact, it’s a helpful guide for how to make your writing snappy, clear, and entertaining. It makes explicit the classic principles of storytelling in an easily digestible way and I completely understand why it’s often on the shelves of aspiring screenwriters. It’s on my bookshelf at this very moment. 

The problem is not the guidelines of Save the Cat; the problem is when these guidelines are treated like immutable rules (which, to be fair, the book encourages). In a Reddit thread (I’m sorry) about the Save the Cat methodology, you can see this back and forth regarding the purpose of “writing rules”:

“Craig-D-Griffiths: “I have what I write. No rules. I am dictated to by the story. I truly believe you cannot look at art and try and turn it into engineering…. To be a great portrait painter, portraits must be 40% blue paint. Sounds ridiculous. But we let people sell us books and lectures that do exactly that….

SpikeWoodyQuentin: In my opinion, Screenwriting is the exception to the “rule” of everything you just said. In my opinion, it’s not art. Not like the others at least. A screenplay is written so that you can visualize how this story would work on the big or small screen…Two people sitting face-to-face at a table delivering exposition is boring to me. The Pope taking laps in a pool or floating while exposition is being dumped is interesting (the Pope swims?). You don’t have to follow it, but it has value.

Craig-D-Griffiths: Formulas, rules and beat sheets (whatever they sell) is comforting. To think “if I follow this everything will be okay”, is a huge comfort. It is very scary to think “there are no guarantees and the world changes so fast you can only hope there will be an overlap between a need and what you have to offer.”. 

Jakekerr: To my mind, if you have to think about an “immutable law” you are such a raw beginner that you should just focus on structural basics like dialogue and scene construction… An architect doesn’t dream of load-bearing columns. They dream of manipulating the space between them.”

(Thread abridged for your viewing pleasure)

Art is not science nor technology; it suffers from being optimized. While screenplays do have to serve a structural purpose, the guiding light for the disparate vision of various artists, this is not the same as there being a requisite structure for the story itself. 

There’s a tendency to see the humanities and arts as lesser than STEM subjects because they grapple with subjectivity. Some artists push back against this not by championing the virtues of our field, but by proving that actually we’re more scientific than you’d think. You can see this impulse strongly in Save the Cat, where advice becomes “formula”, character can be “engineered”, writing can be “mechanical”, and stories are something that we “carry in our DNA”. 

“Snyder: The other important thing in the first book was the concept that there are ten story types. So what I wanted to do in the second book is basically prove my point, prove the case.

[Interviewer] Walsh: It did feel like a scientific proof, like we were peering into your personal notebook, what you’d worked out.”

REWIND, 2008: A Conversation with Blake Snyder, author of SAVE THE CAT!

The point of a pilot: setting up the show

Save the Cat! Writes for TV: The Last Book on Creating Binge-Worthy Content You’ll Ever Need, based on Snyder’s original book and written by screenwriter Jamie Nash, outlines the following structure for a TV episode: 

1. Opening image
2. Catalyst
3. Break into 2 (the hero decides to take action and locks in to accomplish a goal, venturing into a new world, or choosing a new way of thinking)
4. Midpoint (This beat is a false victory or a false defeat, [raising] the stakes on the hero, forcing them to narrow their focus on winning the day or surviving)
5. All is lost
6. Break into 3 (a new piece of information is discovered, and the hero realizes what they must do to solve all the problems that have been created in Act 2)
7. Final image

When I say that IWTV breaks from “good TV writing” conventions, I don’t mean that it reinvents the wheel. The above structure is generic enough that you can probably map it to most stories, the way that you can say all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. In fact, I think that mapping the pilot episodes of Yellowjackets and IWTV against this framework can help me illuminate the difference in each show’s approach to story.

Let’s graph it out, since Save the Cat aims at a scientific patina.

Visual 1: Pilot episode plot map IWTV and Yellowjackets

Note: The following visual maps each show’s timelines separately, to show how the past and present plots intertwine. I’ve marked each section out as either “Present” or “Past”. I list Present or Past first based on which the show uses as its framing device (the opening and closing scenes of the episode). The plot map doesn’t cover all the plot points in the episodes, mainly focusing on the points of tension. For example, the Yellowjackets side doesn’t mention Misty, a major character throughout the series who has a more limited role in the pilot. 

Something that I noticed immediately when mapping plot points for the two pilots was the different approach they take to their dual storylines. For ITWV, the present is primarily a framing device, an emotional shell for the story. The main plot takes place in the past. Meanwhile, Yellowjackets gives plot and mystery to both its past and present storylines. 

In fact, the present day of the Yellowjackets pilot is loaded with story. Each character finds themselves at a crossroads: Shauna is unhappy in her life as wife and mother and it’s heavily hinted that her husband is cheating on her; Taissa is running for senate; Natalie just got out of rehab and is clearly embarking on some kind of revenge plot. And all of these potential stories exist underneath the uniting catalyst of there being a reporter of unknown origin looking into the girls and their time in the woods. The show strongly insinuates that we have good reason to suspect Jessica as more than your run-of-the-mill journalist.

The past and present in IWTV are interwoven, the characters of today serving as emotional echoes of their past selves. It’s the 1910s, and Paul just walked off the roof; it’s the 2020s, and Louis feels that pain acutely. Because of the structure of the show as an interview, the present literally exists to re-litigate the past, especially as this is Daniel’s second attempt at getting the truth out of Louis. The past is a character study, showing you how we got to the Louis of now from the Louis of then.

Meanwhile, in Yellowjackets, the character arcs between the past and present felt disjointed from the show’s catalyst: the survivalist plot. It almost feels like what happened in the woods is irrelevant to the adults that the girls developed into:

• Shauna in the past is conflicted about her choices. She wants to go to a different college from her best friend, Jackie, but she can’t find the words to tell her. She is having an affair with Jeff, Jackie’s boyfriend, but she’s in denial about how bad it is. Shauna, in the present, is in a loveless marriage (with Jeff) but is in denial about how bad it is. She is clearly not happy with the way her life has gone, but can’t find the words to express it.
• Taissa in the past is confident and ambitious to the point of injuring others in her pursuit of greatness. Taissa in the present is running for Senate despite how difficult it is and the pressure it puts on her family. 
• Natalie in the past is a “burnout” who self-medicates with drugs and alcohol. She is quick to anger and has a strong sense of justice. Natalie in the present has been in and out of rehab and has a newfound purpose in a plot to seek justice.

Even Misty doesn’t seem to get any of her cruelty from her time in the woods. In the present, she works in a nursing home, cruelly denying a resident their painkillers because they annoyed her. You might think that this lack of respect for life and dignity comes from her time as a survivalist cannibal, but that’s within her even before she gets on the plane. The pilot takes the time to show us Misty impassively watching a rat drown in her family pool, holding the implement she could use to save it at arm’s length. 

The clickbait-ification of stories

“When done poorly, the cliffhanger is all about shoddy craftsmanship, the creepy manipulation by a storyteller who has run out of tricks. When done well, however, it can be about much more: surprise, shock, outrage, and pleasure—the sort of thing that might send you dancing off the sofa. The cliffhanger is part of some of the silliest shows on TV; it’s also key to understanding many of the greatest ones. It’s the visceral jolt that’s not so easily detached from television’s most erudite achievements. But, then, that’s the mind-body problem of TV, a conversation that has only just begun.” 

Emily Nussbaum, Tune in Next Week

Clickbait can be fun. It can be engaging. But it is not artistically fulfilling. A story comes across as a cheap trick when we emerge from it only to find that our hard-won attention was squandered. We usually use clickbait to refer to cheap online articles that employ outlandish titles to draw us in: “This woman found a hidden door in her attic… and you’ll never believe what happens next!” But, I would argue that you can see similar attention-mining techniques in the world of storytelling. 

Few shows represent this quite as well as the aptly named Netflix series Clickbait (2021), an eight-part thriller about an abducted man who appears in a viral video that claims that at five million views, he dies. Very Black Mirror. I watched Clickbait one lazy Sunday afternoon in the living room I shared with six roommates, and I ended up finishing it that same day. I found it impossible to turn away from. Each episode ended on a revelation that changed everything. The more you learned, the greater the mystery. As a narrative, Clickbait drew you in so much that one roommate caught half an episode in his periphery while he made dinner, and couldn’t rest until I told him how it ended.

The problem was not keeping my attention; the problem happened when the show finally ended. Separated from the thrill of the story itself, I suddenly realized that I found it hard to recall a single thing about the show. What happened in it? Who were the characters? What themes did it explore? The writing, which had seemed so tight during the watch, revealed itself to be an illusion.

“[Clickbait is] another entry in…the clickbaitification of Netflix – cheaply produced, fast-churned, deceptively bland series designed to keep you watching.”

Adrian Horton, Clickbait review – silly Netflix thriller series isn’t worth clicking on 

Returning to our pilots, how they end reveals the difference between an earnest and a deceptive call to action. Yellowjackets ends on a bang: the plane crash is coming–prepare for cannibalism. Each episode of the first season uses the same cliffhanger tactic, leaving us with a death, a betrayal, a character uncovering information that they’ll have to deal with next episode. It’s the kind of thing that has you clicking “Play next episode.” But then the season was over and, despite spending all this time with the characters, I feel like I barely got to know them. Much of the conflict throughout the show is self-inflicted (and not in a satisfying “you are your own enemy” way; in a frustrating “it didn’t have to be like this” way). At the end of the season, you realize that the show uses a haze of mysticism and intrigue to juice up plots that just aren’t all that interesting. You start to wonder if all there is to the show is its twists and its turns. 

Meanwhile, the pilot episode of IWTV builds and resolves a contained narrative arc, showing you its deft hand when it comes to character. It doesn’t seem afraid of ending plots that might be mined for more intrigue, allowing its forward momentum to be driven by character rather than pacing best practice. Louis’ relationship with Lestat is a “will they, won’t they?” that could have been stretched out over several episodes. However, the pilot says, “obviously you know they will, so let’s just commit”; by the end of the first episode, Louis is both a vampire and romantically enmeshed with Lestat.

But, more interesting is how the pilot episode handles Louis’ relationship with his family, particularly centered around his brother. The emotional tension between Paul, a religious man who disapproves severely of what Louis has done with the family fortune, and Louis, who understands that their only hope at maintaining wealth is through his salacious business, could have been used as a recurring thorn in Louis’ side. You can imagine Paul as a season-long antagonist, a loose thread that nags at Louis’ success as a vampire. But once again, the pilot trusts its own story to build and resolve future conflicts. Paul and Louis’ disagreement reaches a conclusion with Paul’s untimely death. To an extent, Paul wins, Louis’ mother siding with the dead son over the living. 

The IWTV pilot doesn’t really end on a cliffhanger. There’s nothing that we’re desperate to know or uncover. What brings us back is Louis himself; I want to know what will happen to him. This remains true across the season. Most episodes wrap up their own narrative’s loose threads, ending with emotional impact rather than reveal. You and the characters have to sit with what they just experienced. It shows a lot of faith in its own writing and a lot of faith in its audience. The only episode that ends on a reveal is the season finale; by that point, the show has earned my goodwill, so it feels less like a cheap trick, and more like “the sort of thing that [sends me dancing] off the sofa.”

In Forbes, Paul Tassi describes season 2 of Yellowjackets as “a huge quality drop-off from season one… The slow burn of the past storyline was gone…over the course of a few minutes they went from “we couldn’t possibly eat [REDACTED]” to “we are now going to hunt [REDACTED] and howl like wolves as we chase them with axes.” Tassi complains that the story set in the present is worse, leaning too hard into “[a plotline that’s] disconnected from the main plotlines despite being turned into a main plotline itself [that] lasted this entire season only to be wrapped up in about 30 seconds.” But when I look at a pilot, I wonder if the issue really is a quality shift. I don’t actually think season 2 is all that much worse than season 1; I just think that the tricks are wearing thin.

Pope in the Pool: Trick your audience into paying attention

“Pope in the Pool is a way you can bury exposition. You know, how are you going to get information across that the audience needs to know in a way that isn’t boring? You know, the best way to do it is to distract them with other stuff happening. You know, you are being shot at by bad guys while saying the clues to the movie or the story. Much more interesting! On the run, grabbing a taxicab, being shot at. “You mean to say” “Yes!” Slam, drive, squeal of wheels. “He said that?” “Absolutely!” Bang, bang! Instead of sitting there in a coffee shop and spilling your guts.”

Blake Snyder, REWIND, 2008: A Conversation with Blake Snyder, author of SAVE THE CAT!

According to Snyder, Pope in the Pool is a method that writers can use to deliver information while maintaining audience attention. He based the term on a script his friend once read about a plot to kill the Pope, which delivers key backstory from the strange location of the Vatican’s swimming pool. According to Synder, the audience is so captivated by the information that there’s a pool (???) in the Vatican that they don’t realize they’re being force-fed exposition.

Like most of Save the Cat, the Pope in the Pool is an interesting concept when used as a tool, but becomes frustrating when used as, what Snyder himself called, “an immutable law of screenplay physics” (there’s that science talk again).

Pope in the Pool is like a magic trick, a misdirection—you draw attention to the right hand so that no one notices what the left is doing. But, like a magic trick, it fails spectacularly if the audience notices it’s happening. Moreover, unlike close-up magic, where one is expecting to be tricked, I don’t want to be tricked by stories. Both Yellowjackets and IWTV inject their stories with elements of intrigue—sex, violence—but the difference comes down to how and to what end.

Interpersonal drama: the girls are fighting

Interpersonal drama is a great way of hooking an audience, especially if it involves a secret. Here are two little guys but one of them is betraying the other. You, who are in on the secret, watch with bated breath. When will it get revealed? What will the fallout be? The tension is there from the outset. 

When it comes to interpersonal drama, Yellowjackets leans heavily into hidden truths, relying on the classic writing advice of making sure that each character has a secret to keep and threatening to reveal it at every moment. On the flip side, IWTV is more interested in exploring characters with conflicting purposes. Technically, Lestat’s vampirism is a secret to Louis, as is his single-minded hunt of him, but there is no doubt to the audience about what ends up happening. The tension is not “will Lestat succeed” but “how did Louis get lured in?” As Louis explicitly says, he wants the tale to seduce Daniel (and the audience) in the way that he was seduced. 

What feels satisfying about the interpersonal stakes of IWTV is how they connect to the story’s central themes. Louis and Paul are at odds about the family business, but they are also loving brothers. In their first onscreen interaction, Louis pulls a knife on Paul. Get out of here, he threatens, “Else I bleed ya like a kochon, brah.” But only a few scenes later, they’re walking to church together, friendly and loving. They don’t snip; they chat. You realize the relationship is more complex than just two men with opposing views. There is love; there is a shared history. 

Beyond their interpersonal tensions, Paul and Louis also act as each others’ foils. Paul is pious and unbending in his principles, always willing to speak out in favor of what he believes. Meanwhile, Louis is pragmatic and repressed; he keeps his cards close to his chest. When speaking to his family about an opera he and Lestat attended, Louis complains, “My stomach got grumbling, left halfway through.” Later, Lestat calls him on this:

“Lestat: The liberty [Paul] has with his thoughts… however misshapen they might be, your brother has no shame sharing them.

Louis: You saying I got shame? 

Lestat: The lie about leaving the opera house early? You were near weeping when the curtain fell. Why hide that from your family?

Louis: Don’t everyone need to know what I do.

Lestat: Dishonesty breeds dishonesty.”

Meanwhile, the interpersonal drama present in the pilot of Yellowjackets is certainly intriguing, but feels disconnected, a random collection of stressful scenarios. As I took notes about all the points of tension that the pilot alone introduces, I found myself exhausted. 

Starting with the past, you have:

• Shauna and Jackie (best friends, allegedly) are supposed to go to college together, but unbeknownst to Jackie, Shauna was accepted into Brown and is seriously considering going there instead.
• Taissa wants to freeze out Allie because she played badly in the last game; Natalie vehemently disagrees, Lottie is unsure, Shauna is half on board, Jackie is deliberately kept in the dark.
• Taissa accidentally breaks Allie’s leg at practice when pushing her too hard; Shaun accuses her of doing it on purpose.
• Shauna is having an affair with Jackie’s boyfriend, Jeff.
• Shauna is about crashland in the wilderness with a potential pregnancy (this isn’t a spoiler; when she’s banging Jeff, she says “If you cum inside me, I’ll raise the baby out of spite and train it to be a killing machine that eventually hunts you down”; if impromptu rawdogging in the car isn’t a Chekov’s gun enough, then that line cements it).
• Lottie takes some kind of antipsychotic medication with her breakfast (which we can assume will not be readily available in the wild).

Even the way that characters are introduced feels like it’s imbued with a patina of intrigue; it’s Pope-in-the-Pool-ified, made as interesting as possible so that you feel like you have to pay attention. When we first meet Natalie, she’s drinking before school with her friends. But, that’s not saucy enough; she also gets sexually harassed by seniors. But even that isn’t enough: she then loses her temper and lobs the glass bottle at their car. Don’t worry, she assures her friends, they have to catch them to beat them up. Run! This feels like escalation without consequences. The angry seniors never reappear. They’re more a symbol of Natalie’s rebellion and dissatisfaction. Ultimately, the scene goes nowhere.

Yellowjackets operates on a one-note tone of constant tension. Unlike IWTV, which contrasts tension and love, in Yellowjackets, there is rarely harmony between characters. Every conversation is a battleground. Even best friends Jackie and Shauna seem to only speak in rebukes: in their very first scene together, Jackie complains about Shauna’s music taste, then starts babbling about how they can decorate their college dorm next year (a conversation topic at which Shauna looks guilty). The next time that they’re alone together, getting ready for a party, they are once again at odds. Jackie proffers fashion advice and a potential romantic interest; Shauna sharply pushes back. Where I can easily perceive the undercurrent of love that flows between Paul and Louis, I see Shauna and Jackie and think: how exactly are you best friends? You barely seem to like each other.

Rated R for violence, blood, and gore

“IWTV makes good on all the nasty people-eating terror Yellowjackets teased for an entire season, but piles on decapitations, mutilations, immolations, and too many shots of Jacob Anderson eating a rat. …Very few vampire romances also count as legit horror; this is one of them.”

Rebecca Alter, “It’s time to let Interview with the Vampire seduce you”

The gore in IWTV stands out, brief flashes of violence that stand out against the backdrop of lush costumes, beautiful sets, and delicate character writing. It is effective; it is all-encompassing. The most violent scene in the pilot of IWTV is Lestat’s attack on the church. The intermingling of brutality and passion is both a culmination of Lestat’s claim that he “inherited his father’s temper” and foreshadowing of the turbulent relationship to come. It is a tacit threat, providing a glimpse of Lestat’s raw power, his willingness to destroy all that stands in his way. His fist bursts through the head of an unwilling witness like it’s a rotting watermelon. A man’s life shatters apart in chunks and viscera, all because Lestat willed it. 

In Yellowjackets, cannibalism provides the main motif of violence in the pilot episode. Interwoven throughout the episode is a glimpse of the girls’ future in the wilderness, where they’ve become ritualistic hunters unafraid of breaking one of the most sacred human taboos. In a vacuum, I love these scenes. They are tense and unflinching. However, the hindsight of the entire season renders them another empty promise. 

To a certain extent, Yellowjackets feels like it punishes an audience that pays too much attention, something made crystal clear through the ritualistic hunt scenes of the first episode. I remember watching that scene and clasping onto two details: 

1. The dead girl in the pit is wearing a heart-shaped necklace.
2. The girl who finds pit girl is wearing battered pink Converse. 

Immediately, I am scouring the girls for these objects. Pretty quickly, the shows seems like it will deliver. In Jackie’s very first scene, she is wearing the heart necklace, which already sets off alarm bells. But then, on the plane, she gives it to Shauna as a good luck charm; sound the second round of alarm bells. The mystery is afoot. We know for a fact that Shauna survives, so now the thing to watch for is: who will Shauna donate her good luck charm to (and isn’t it ironic that it certainly will not bring good luck)? The dramatic irony writes itself. 

But, slight spoiler alert, no. You do not get rewarded for paying attention. You get no special insights into who will die next, at least not through any subtlety. The necklace ends up passed to the victim in an explicit ritual that undercuts the tension of the first episode. Worse, this doesn’t happen until season 3, by which point it feels like the show is scrambling to address their opening gambit.

Don’t even ask about the pink converse because they will never come up again.

The final nail in the coffin of my esteem for that opening scene was when I read that it had actually been filmed with extras; even as they filmed it, the showrunners didn’t actually know who pit girl was supposed to be. Suddenly, everything becomes clear. It feels like an unplanned mess because that’s what it was. After all the intrigue, it turned out to just be another thing designed to draw me in, with little thought about its wider purpose.

(The scene where Taissa accidentally breaks Allie’s leg is also excessively violent, explicitly showing a compound fracture in all its terrible glory. But, like many of Yellowjackets’ tricks, this is disconnected from the rest of the plot, feeling instead like a cheap gore shot more so than anything resembling commentary.)

Audiences only want one thing, and it’s disgusting

“Even during normal, shirts-on scenes, there’s a horny undercurrent that runs through the whole show as IWTV explores these characters’ dynamics in their relationships to each other: predator/prey, dom/sub, lover/ex, couple/third. This isn’t like other R-rated prestige TV shows where the sex scenes — when they even exist — feel perfunctory. They are not an afterthought or an addition.”

Rebecca Alter, “It’s Time to Let Interview With the Vampire Seduce You”

Sex underpins IWTV, not only on a plot level but thematically. Being a show about vampires, it explicitly deals with the politics of desire, especially those that might be considered unconventional. Vampirism and sexuality have long been linked, blood-lust and lust-lust happy bedfellows. IWTV makes this connection explicit in a way that is left implicit in other iterations of the IWTV story. The first time that Lestat drinks from Louis is also a sex scene. 

“Blood-hungry, sexually rapacious, and transgressive, the old monsters speak to our primal fears of penetration and contamination by an abject “other”… they are, in fact, us – a sort of funhouse mirror reflecting back to our eye a warped, corrupted, and inverted image of our own potential human goodness.”

Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema

The connection between sex and transgression is further woven into the story by Louis’ business enterprise as a brothel manager, what Daniel dismissively refers to as his “pimp” work. Unable to find “honest” work, Louis has to operate in the shadows. His connection to sex work is not used as a flimsy excuse to fill our scenes with writhing bodies; in fact, for all the time that Louis spends in brothels, you rarely see the sex workers themselves engage in sex onscreen. It’s not there to titillate the audience but to highlight the way that Louis’ role in his society is providing for the desires of others all while denying his own.

Louis is already marginalized a Black man in the early 1900s South, let alone the fact that he’s gay. He understands his precarious position, and responds by never allowing himself to form intimacy with men. Lestat in his privilege as a white man and immortal creature sees this and rejects it; you can understand his appeal to Louis as he encourages this repressed man to at last give in to his own desire. 

The sex in Yellowjackets is a lot more… gratuitous, even when it’s less explicit. 

Our introduction to Jackie is through a scene where Jeff is fingerbanging her with the fury of a rabid hyena; when she gently provides guidance, he takes it as shyness around her own desire. “Don’t worry babe,” he says, “I want you to.” In this scene, you understand how delicate the balance of teen girl desire must be to not be considered aberrant. Jackie is supposed to be demure about orgasms, giving in only when the male force allows her to, but is not allowed to actually express her real desires. It’s a good start to an exploration of the social expectations placed on teen girls (which is connected to overall themes of the show, where their isolation allows them to shed social roles in exchange for something more primal), but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Like so many of its other elements, the main impression is “disconnected.”

Over the course of the show, you don’t get a particularly strong understanding of any of the girls’ sexual needs, especially those external to men. Sexuality is not about the self but about the other. In the wild, it’s not about their needs but about their relationship to Travis, the one age-appropriate boy. 

The show uses sex for its shock value more than for its storytelling. I think the scene where this is laid the most bare is in Adult Shauna’s introduction, where we find her in her daughter’s room, using a vibrator, staring at a photo of her daughter’s seventeen-year-old boyfriend. It’s not that it lacks meaning; clearly there’s something there about how Shaun is emotionally stunted because of her trauma as a teen, which pushes her towards aberrant desire. But again, like with Jackie, that doesn’t become a major component of her character or character arc. Or, rather, for Shauna, the show gives her a hodgepodge of unconventional sexual behaviors that feel less like a coherent picture of a woman and more like sex scenes picked out of a hat labelled “Shock factor.” The most telling thing about how little they play into her character is how easily you could cut them out of the show altogether and end up with roughly the same effect. 

How to make ambiguity feel satisfying

“In an account related by an unreliable narrator, the author has built in a potential double vision: first, the narrator’s own version, the one he presents in his account; and second, a revised view of the narrator and his role which results from the reader’s eventual perception of his unreliability.”

Sharon Smart Kellum, “The Art of Self-incriminations: Studies in Unreliable Narration”

At the core of Yellowjackets is a question that gets asked from the very first episode: “What do you really think happened out there?” Yellowjackets has no official narrator in the traditional sense, meaning that any unreliability comes from the camera itself. Accustomed to an honest camera, one that the user can typically assume is neutral and factual, this provides an interesting experience. We come to realize that there is no objective truth about what happened, for even those with first-hand experience are compromised. Starving, traumatized, isolated, the witnesses cannot be trusted to relay their own truth. As Hattie Lindert explores in the Yellowjackets season 2 finale: “It was just us”, “The real meat of the series has always been the emotional and literal uncertainty of the trauma the survivors shared. Were they pushed to the most primal depths of their psyche, or did they reach for them? Did the wilderness make decisions, or did they?”

I’m a fan of this; it’s one of the things that I think works best in the show. In particular, the show uses the supernatural as a source of ambiguity, allowing the girls to psychologically distance themselves from actions that are better blamed on fate. In the wilderness, symbols take on magical meaning; the known is set aside to make room for clairvoyance and magic. The woods themselves become a character, seeming almost sentient. This magic haunts the girls through to the present day, where distance from the wild leads them to question the truth of what they experienced. The ambiguity reflects their trauma back at them. An inability to find answers underpins their pains: why did this happen? Did we do the right thing? Was it worth it to survive? Why her? Why me?

However…

The atmosphere that the show wants to build ultimately fails to manifest. The problem? The rest of the show has too much damn plot. On the one hand, you have slow dread and ritualism, and on the other you have the twisty-turns of a mystery. The show withers under this tonal whiplash. Or, as Robert Spadoni explains in Merchants of Madness, “when the plot’s gears mesh tightly, an atmospheric spell may quickly be broken… Explanation can be bad for atmosphere. Backstories, and other means of filling gaps that would make a character’s motivations or nature less mysterious, can cause an atmosphere to dissipate.”

IWTV has a more traditional unreliable narrator in Louis, the very premise built on his telling of his own story. The show takes this one step further, inventing an angle where the story has already been told, and what we are watching is its reexamination. As a storyteller, Louis represents the shortcomings and biases of a first-hand account. Meanwhile, his journalist counterpart Daniel plays the fact finder, though the show also questions the limitations of this role. As Anne M Canavan explains in “Highly reliable narrators in supernatural fictions, “Journalism is expected to be reliable because it reports on events all over the world and it is for the most part our main source of information. In a normative sense we have to believe and we have to trust. But can we be sure that journalists tell us the truth? That they select the truly important news from thousands of events every day? Journalists are conventionally classified as reliable storytellers.”

The unreliable narration of IWTV is integral to the narrative; it’s not just about what happens but how it’s framed. Every element of the show feeds into the central theme of storytelling. It investigates the very nature of an interview. How does an interview find truth? How do the motivations of the interviewer and interviewee play into it? The ambiguity places the viewer in the position of an auditor, assessing the story for lies and hidden motivations alongside Daniel. 

***

“Make no mistake: Interview With the Vampire is one of the best shows currently on television…People keep bemoaning the lack of good TV these days—well, the answer is right there, waiting for its big moment, under constant threat of cancellation

Nadira Goffee, Interview With the Vampire Is the Best Show Almost Nobody Is Watching

In a world where ChatGPT usage is on the rise, I often think about the role of the artist. As a technology, generative AI is basically a giant word calculator, spitting out the average of whatever request you input. By nature, it creates nothing new, merely regurgitating the existing. I’ve seen people online accuse bad writing in TV shows of being “written by ChatGPT,” but I don’t think there’s always a clockable vibe to things that the plagiarism machine created. I think, instead, what they’re seeing is something generic, soulless. Something lacking a point of view. Today’s “slop” was yesterday’s “committee-written garbage.”

“Good TV writing” is about following rules. It produces a workable story, but not a great one. More bluntly: if you paint by the numbers then your art looks like it was painted by the numbers. To make art that says something, you need to be an artist with something to say. The truth is that there is no optimal way to tell a story; there is no scientifically perfect writing technique. The alternative? Do as Anne Rice says and “follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

“Brennan Lee Mulligan: There’s a concept that Akira Kurosawa talks about, and it’s in a lot of Miyazaki movies as well called ma [space, or the space in between]… The action has been building and building and building, and then we get here and it suddenly stops. Why? There’s a throughline in the things I’m railing against, which is the really soulless instinct to optimize. It’s that same principle of “number go up,” of “for the movie to be exciting, everything has to be exciting.” 

Matt Mercer: We’ve had this conversation about the animated series and it’s been a fight. [We’ve had] many hard-won moments to allow those moments of ma, to take a quiet beat and live in the world and feel it breath, to remind yourself that the stakes don’t matter unless you’re reminded what you’re fighting for.”

Brennan Lee Mulligan & Matt Mercer | GMs