Yellowjackets Season 2 Breaks Record That Lasted A Decade
Yellowjackets Season 2 has now broken the record for best Showtime debut for a second installment.
As if Yellowjackets Season 1 wasn’t already successful enough, Yellowjackets Season 2 has now broken the record for best debut for a second installment – a record that was previously held for over 10 years, according to Deadline. “Yellowjackets broke records as the most streamed Showtime debut ever thanks to Ashley [Lyle], Bart [Nickerson], Jonathan [Lisco], and our extraordinary ensemble cast who brought season two to even greater heights,” said Showtime’s President/CEO Chris McCarthy, who is also the President/CEO of Paramount Media Networks and MTV Entertainment Studios.
“By tapping into our proven strategy of promoting series across our full portfolio of brands at Paramount Media Networks,” he continued, “we successfully broadened the reach and brought new viewers into this incredible series that deftly combines psychological horror, dark comedy, and coming-of-age drama.” So, in other words, Yellowjackets’ success was no fluke: now that Showtime is joining forces with Paramount, the show has reached all new audiences who joined its established fan base to make the Season 2 premiere even bigger than Season 1’s.
Yellowjackets is an interesting mix of psychological horror, coming-of-age drama, and a survival story, which follows a high school soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness. In a story not unlike Lord of the Flies, the young girls must learn to survive within that wilderness – something that only serves to divide them and turn many of them into savages. The show then skips to 25 years later, when the survivors are still trying to escape this dark, haunting part of their past that just won’t seem to go away.
The Season 2 premiere of the very buzzy Yellowjackets series saw nearly two million viewers across all viewing platforms – even more than the 1.3 million that tuned in for its season finale last year.
Season 1 of Yellowjackets received an incredible seven Emmy nominations and saw an average of 5 million or more viewers across all platforms every week. It also scored a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and beat the record for the highest average weekly viewership for a freshman series on Showtime since Billions debuted in 2016. Yellowjackets takes second place for the most-streamed series in Showtime’s history.
Season 2 of Yellowjackets is continuing this winning streak by taking the title of top season debut for a Showtime original. The previous holder of this prestigious honor was Dexter: New Blood, a miniseries that served as a continuation of the original Dexter series.
So, what is responsible for all this success? Aside from an intriguing plot, Yellowjackets also has star power on its side. The main cast includes Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, and Tawny Cypress, and the second season will see even more big stars join, including Simone Kessell, Elijah Wood, and Lauren Ambrose.
Yellowjackets will also again star Sophie Nelisse, Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Steven Krueger, Liv Hewson, Warren Jole, Kevin Alves, and Jasmin Savoy Brown in Season 2. The show was created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson of Narcos fame and is executive produced by the two of them and their fellow showrunner Jonathan Lisco.
