Yellowjackets review: Teen angst and cannibalism make for a compelling thriller
Yellowjackets, a gruesome series set across two timelines, is among four great shows to watch this week. But don’t waste your time on Netflix’s latest offering.
Yellowjackets
Paramount+
Remember that Uruguayan rugby team that crashed into the Andes mountain and survived because they resorted to cannibalism? Well add a lashing of teen angst, periods from hell, and a Liz Phair soundtrack and you’ve got yourself Yellowjackets, Showtime’s gruesome, bone-crunching survival series. Set across two timelines, it follows a girl’s high school football team who, in 1996, crash into the Canadian wilderness while flying from New Jersey to a tournament in Seattle, where they must survive for 19 months. In the present day timeline, the Yellowjackets survivors, now middle-age, are all haunted and stunted in some way by what happened in those woods. The adult ensemble stars Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (still a badass), Christina Ricci (creepy!), Lauren Ambrose, and Simone Kessell — all amazing, and their teen versions, mostly newcomer actors, are worthy opponents. You’ve got one week to catch up on the first season before season two drops.
This is Going to Hurt
Binge
The doctor turned TV writer Adam Kay adapted his own memoir, which is based on five years of diary entries he kept while working as a junior doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology (”brats and twats”) ward at a National Health Service hospital, with This Is Going to Hurt, a devastating and cynically funny BBC medical drama that stars the always impeccable Ben Whishaw. Life at the hospital is dismal, it’s understaffed, the pay is measly, the building is crumbling, the equipment is archaic, and the damn alarm won’t stop blaring. Adam is barely coping. The burnout from his 97-hour work weeks has turned him into a shoddy boyfriend, a cantankerous colleague, and a sloppy physician who, in a tragic sequence, mistakenly sends a sweet but dim patient home in a huff to nearly-fatal consequences. Adam is a spiky character, and in the hands of anyone other than Whishaw, would be totally unlikeable. This isn’t for the squeamish — the blood, guts, and bodily clumps flung around the hospital give David Cronenberg a run for his money.
Top Boy
Netflix
This extraordinary, lurid crime drama, which has been heralded as the UK’s answer to The Wire, is one of the best British TV shows of the decade.Despite its high ratings, and critical acclaim, it was tragically cancelled after just two seasons in 2013. Four years later, Netflix — on the insistence of Canadian rapper and Top Boy superfan Drake — resurrected it as Top Boy: Summerhouse. Rapper-actors Kane Robinson, or Kano, and Ashley Walters lead the cast as friends-turned-rival-drug dealers Sully and Dushane. The show, written by Ronan Bennett, the Irish screenwriter and novelist, is an unflinching and often extreme depiction of the poverty, violence, and drug trade that has long existed among the most disaffected and vulnerable communities in London. If you’ve got a teenage boy in the house, you’d be wise to keep them away from this show — lest they end up trailing you around, calling you “bruv” and bleeding you dry with the incessant begging for Stone Island clobber.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
9:30pm, SBS Food
Anthony Bourdain — what a tremendous, gutting loss. The chef and TV personality, who took his own life in a French hotel room in 2018 while filming Parts Unknown, was the foul-mouthed saint of culinary TV. He could be irascible, and was prone to mood swings and cruel bouts of depression, which he never shied from documenting — in a Parts Unknown episode about Buenos Aires, he took his first therapy session on camera. Yet he was immensely kind, infinitely curious and a true celebrant of communities, cultures and their food. This show is a cut above all the other food travel, because Bourdain let locals lead the way. Whether you want the scoop on where to eat on your next European holiday, or you just want to hang out with the greatest culinary punk of our time, as he scoffs down grilled pork with Barack Obama in Vietnam, there’s something here for everyone. You can watch every episode of Parts Unknown for free on SBS on Demand.
You
Watch on Netflix
This show is the pits. It is seriously awful. It’s like if Emily in Paris was a murdering sociopath, and like Emily, Joe Goldberg has hooked into our veins, and has us crawling back season after season. For the uninitiated: Joe, played by Gossip Girl heart-throb Penn Badgley, is the bookish protagonist (or antagonist? what does one call a merciless murderer that you sort of have a crush on?), who has a tendency to fall in violent, delusional love. For three seasons we’ve seen him stalk, seduce, and murder women. Now, in its fourth season, Joe is the one being stalked. After killing his last wife, Love (also a murderer), he successfully faked his own death, escaped suburban California, and hightailed it to England, where he is posing as a university professor. Somehow, he’s fallen in with the highfalutin, upper crust of society — of whom are one-by-one, being murdered off.