Write On with 'Yellowjackets' Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson

A team of wildly talented high school girl soccer players becomes the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness in the Showtime series. Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson talk to Write On about the journey it took to get the series to screen. "We took [ Yellowjackets] out to fifteen networks; we pitched so many times,” Ashley said. “It was all fully scripted and memorized because that's how we have to pitch - especially when there are two of us. If we don't have it scripted, it's just too easy to step on each other or have a weird gap, so we just memorized 35 minutes word for word and then pretended it was all off the cuff."

 

Ashley and Bart go on to talk about their collaborative process. According to Bart, "Learning how to write or be a writer is something that you will always feel like you are so far behind on, and you are so incomplete, and the way that you do this is insane and weird, and not only is it okay, but you can continue to be adjusting that approach. Be okay with it feeling weird and hard."