--- name: "Ashley Lyle" canonical: "https://film.one/person/ashley-lyle" roles: ["Creator","Writer"] reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T04:01:12.345996+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Ashley Lyle Creator and writer. Born in Belmar, New Jersey. ## Details - **Work:** Creator, Writer ## Fi1m on Ashley Lyle > Ashley Lyle writes women who are funny at the worst possible moment. With Bart Nickerson she built *Yellowjackets* out of two timelines and one long secret, and the half set in the woods is tense, funny and frightening; the other half has yet to catch up. Somebody in *Yellowjackets* is always making a joke at the wrong time. A girl is hurt, or hungry, or has just seen something in the trees, and another girl says the thing a teenager would say, and it lands, and then the fear comes back in behind the laugh. That is Lyle's habit as a writer, and she knows it. She has said that the phrase in the writers' room is "Yellowjackets is a comedy. It's a very, very dark comedy to our minds." We would not argue with either half of that. She and Nickerson spent the best part of a decade on other people's programmes before they got one of their own: *The Originals* (2013), then *Narcos* (2017), *Narcos: Mexico* (2018) and *Dispatches from Elsewhere* (2020). None of those is a show anyone would call theirs, and we have not reviewed them, so we will not pretend to judge her hand in them. What we can say is that they added up to a long apprenticeship in genre television, and in 2021 the pair came out of it with *Yellowjackets*, which they created together and have run since. The idea is simple and the structure is not. A New Jersey high school girls' soccer team goes down in the mountains in the spring of 1996; twenty-five years later the survivors are keeping quiet in the suburbs. Lyle tells both stories at once, the girls and the women, and plants small things in one timeline that pay off, sometimes a season later, in the other. The woods half is the show. We were more frightened by it than we expected to be by a drama about a soccer team, and the fright comes from the writing: the girls go on talking like teenagers, cruel and quick and loyal, while the situation around them stops being anything a teenager should have to manage. Lyle is interested in girls' friendships and girls' anger, and she takes both as seriously as the survival. The suburban half is where the trouble is. We scored the series 76, and the twenty points we held back are nearly all owed to the present day, which is a thinner show carried by better actors, and one the series has never quite admitted is thinner. The later seasons have also lost some viewers along the way over how dark the story is willing to go, and we will not say where it goes. A mystery told in two timelines has to close the gap between them eventually. The woods have been paying the rent; the question for whatever Lyle writes next is whether the women can. ## Biography Ashley Lyle is an American screenwriter and producer. She graduated from the Lawrenceville School and earned a B.A. and MFA from Columbia University. With her husband and writing partner Bart Nickerson, she created and serves as showrunner and executive producer on the Showtime series *Yellowjackets* (2021–present). The pair previously wrote episodes of *The Originals* (2013–2016), *Narcos* (2017), *Narcos: Mexico* (2018) and *Dispatches from Elsewhere* (2020). They have received Writers Guild of America Award nominations for their work on *Yellowjackets* and signed overall deals with Showtime and later Paramount Television Studios. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, nytimes.com, imdb.com, arts.columbia.edu.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Yellowjackets* (2021), Fi1m 76, Creator, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/yellowjackets.md) ## Also known for - *The Originals* (2013), Writer - *Narcos* (2015), Writer - *Narcos: Mexico* (2018), Teleplay, Writer, Story - *Dispatches from Elsewhere* (2020), Writer, Teleplay, Story --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/ashley-lyle