Is 'Yellowjackets' Based on a True Story?
A guide to some of the show's influences.
If you're watching Yellowjackets, you know by now that it's not based on a true story—at least not exactly. (There's no such thing as the man with no eyes, right? Right?!) But one could argue that the Showtime series, which follows a high-school soccer team that survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness, does at least nod to certain true events. Here's what we know.
Is Yellowjackets based on a true story?
One event that may have inspired Yellowjackets is the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster. In October 1972, a flight carrying 19 members of the Old Christians Club rugby union (plus 26 of their friends, family, and supporters) crashed in the Andes mountains while bound for Chile. Twelve passengers died immediately, while others later died of exposure or serious injuries sustained in the crash. An avalanche killed eight more survivors 17 days after the crash, and the remaining survivors resorted to cannibalism. After 72 days, 16 survivors were rescued.
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Their unimaginable ordeal—and incredible survival—became the subject of a 1974 book, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors—which, in turn, became the source material of a 1993 movie starring Ethan Hawke.
Another real-life event the show arguably harkens to is the notorious Donner Party: Pioneers stranded in the snow in the winter of 1846-1847 ate the bodies of those who died (usually from hypothermia, illness, or starvation, save for two Native Americans were brutally murdered to use their flesh for food). Out of 87 members of the traveling party, 48 survived the nearly four-month ordeal.
Yellowjackets co-creator Ashley Lyle has said that the show was partly inspired by a planned film adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies with an all-female cast. Commenters were skeptical that girls would resort to the same brutality that the boys did in the 1954 novel, and Lyle wanted to make a show proving that they would. As she recalled thinking in response to one skeptic: “You were never a teenage girl, sir.”
