Yellowjackets is pulling off a Prestige TV version of Pretty Little Liars - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

TMC · 01-08-2022, 06:14 AM

https://www.vox.com/culture/22868432...en-girl-horror

The key to the Showtime horror survival series is its connection to teen TV, says Constance Grady. "As Vox critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff has already argued, part of the alchemy of Yellowjackets is the way it slams the conventions of different TV genres up against one another," says Grady. "The show combines the sort of puzzle-box mystery show plotting popularized by Lost with astute psychological excavations of trauma along the lines of a show like Succession, plus a healthy amount of good old-fashioned horror stemming from its Lord of the Flies-style premise. It seems built to inspire equal amounts of fan theorizing about its mysteries, analytical essays about how trauma shapes character, and shared notes on how many nightmares it has inspired among its fans. But I’d like to argue that in addition to its pedigreed antecedents, Yellowjackets is also pulling some tropes from a rather less-respected genre. A surprising amount of Yellowjackets’s structure seems to be borrowed from the microgenre of teen soap operas about sexy teens being blackmailed over their sexy secrets; teen shows about surveillance; teen shows that treat secrets as weapons and social capital as the stuff of life-and-death stakes. Specifically, Yellowjackets is pulling an awful lot from Pretty Little Liars, the campy Freeform drama that ran from 2010 to 2017. Pretty Little Liars gives Yellowjackets two of its central mysteries: the question of what happened to the alpha girl at the top of a friend group, and the identity of a mysterious and apparently all-knowing blackmailer. Looking into what the two shows have in common reveals a lot about the emotional ambivalence at the heart of a friendship that gives teen girl horror its teeth — and about how Yellowjackets is thinking about its core emotional dynamic."

01-08-2022, 06:14 AM	#1
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,136	Yellowjackets is pulling off a Prestige TV version of Pretty Little Liars https://www.vox.com/culture/22868432...en-girl-horror The key to the Showtime horror survival series is its connection to teen TV, says Constance Grady. "As Vox critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff has already argued, part of the alchemy of Yellowjackets is the way it slams the conventions of different TV genres up against one another," says Grady. "The show combines the sort of puzzle-box mystery show plotting popularized by Lost with astute psychological excavations of trauma along the lines of a show like Succession, plus a healthy amount of good old-fashioned horror stemming from its Lord of the Flies-style premise. It seems built to inspire equal amounts of fan theorizing about its mysteries, analytical essays about how trauma shapes character, and shared notes on how many nightmares it has inspired among its fans. But I’d like to argue that in addition to its pedigreed antecedents, Yellowjackets is also pulling some tropes from a rather less-respected genre. A surprising amount of Yellowjackets’s structure seems to be borrowed from the microgenre of teen soap operas about sexy teens being blackmailed over their sexy secrets; teen shows about surveillance; teen shows that treat secrets as weapons and social capital as the stuff of life-and-death stakes. Specifically, Yellowjackets is pulling an awful lot from Pretty Little Liars, the campy Freeform drama that ran from 2010 to 2017. Pretty Little Liars gives Yellowjackets two of its central mysteries: the question of what happened to the alpha girl at the top of a friend group, and the identity of a mysterious and apparently all-knowing blackmailer. Looking into what the two shows have in common reveals a lot about the emotional ambivalence at the heart of a friendship that gives teen girl horror its teeth — and about how Yellowjackets is thinking about its core emotional dynamic."