Bart Nickerson co-created Yellowjackets with Ashley Lyle and directs it in part. His television is dark comedy wearing a horror costume, split across two decades, and it is at its best in the woods and at its thinnest in the suburbs.
Fi1m perspective
The habit is the cut across twenty-five years. A girl does something in the mountains in 1996; a woman in the New Jersey suburbs in the present day lies about it, and the join between the two is what Bart Nickerson's television is built on. He and Ashley Lyle made Yellowjackets (2021) out of that structure, and it is the thing they do that others do not: a gory, frightening genre show that keeps stopping to be funny, with a cast of people who would be comic relief anywhere else and are here the whole point.
He came to it slowly. He and Lyle moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and he spent a decade in other people's writers' rooms: The Originals (2013), where he wrote eleven episodes, then Narcos (2017), Narcos: Mexico (2018) and Dispatches from Elsewhere (2020). None of those is his and we would not judge him by them. Yellowjackets is. The two of them run it as a single unit rather than dividing the work, and by Lyle's account Nickerson is the visual one, a painter who takes the lead on colour and on how the thing looks in post. He has directed several episodes himself.
What works is the woods. They frightened us more than a show with this much comedy in it had any right to manage, and the cause is plain: the plane comes down, we know from the outset that not all of these girls come home, and the series lets us watch them work that out for themselves. What works less is the present day. The women are played by better actors than the girls and are given a thinner show, a suburban mystery that borrows its tension from the other timeline instead of finding its own. We scored it 76, and the gap between the halves is the reason it was not higher. Other critics noticed the same wobble in tone early on, and some have found the later seasons unable to live up to the pilot's premise. We would put it less harshly, but the complaint has weight.
He has worked with Jonathan Lisco as showrunner and with Karyn Kusama, who has directed for him twice, and the look of the series is the steadiest thing about it, which fits what we know of where his attention goes. The open question is whether he can make a show without a plane crash in it, one where the horror and the jokes have to share a single room and a single decade. We would like the next one to answer it.
Biography
Bart Nickerson is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He co-created the Showtime series Yellowjackets (2021–) with his wife Ashley Lyle, on which he has also written and directed episodes.
He began his television career writing for The Originals (2013–2016). Subsequent credits include writing for Narcos (2015), Narcos: Mexico (2018) and Dispatches from Elsewhere (2020). Nickerson and Lyle met in 2005 and moved to Los Angeles in 2007.
