Shows Like Yellowjackets: Dark Female-Led Thrillers

Yellowjackets works because of a specific trick. A New Jersey high school soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 and starts doing things you cannot un-see, and the show keeps cutting to those same girls twenty-five years later — middle-aged, employed, allegedly fine, and absolutely not fine. The horror isn't the wilderness. It's watching a woman pick her kid up from school knowing exactly what she ate in 1997.

So when people ask for "shows like Yellowjackets," they're usually asking for one of three things: the survival thriller structure with two timelines, the pack of women who scare each other more than the plot does, or the ending that refuses to explain itself. Below, all three, sorted so you can find your lane.

A useful filter: if the show would still be tense with all the violence removed, it belongs on this list.

Survival Thrillers With Dual Timelines

The dual timeline drama exists for one reason — to let you watch a person become someone else, then show you the receipt.

The Wilds (2020–2022 · Prime Video)

The setup: Eight teenage girls survive a plane crash and wash up on a deserted island. Between survival scenes, the show cuts to each of them being interviewed in a sterile facility after rescue, which raises the obvious question of who's asking and why. The crash was not an accident, and the answer to "who did this" arrives well before the answer to "what for."

The closest structural match to Yellowjackets on television, minus the supernatural fog. What it does better: every girl gets a full backstory episode, so by the time alliances form you understand precisely why the daughter of a Texas beauty queen and a Minnesota loner cannot stand each other. Cancelled after two seasons, which still stings.

Yellowjackets overlap: roughly 80%.

Cruel Summer (2021 · Hulu / Freeform)

The setup: Texas, 1993. Fifteen-year-old Kate Wallis vanishes. Awkward outsider Jeanette Turner quietly takes over Kate's life — friends, boyfriend, popularity. When Kate is found alive, she accuses Jeanette of having seen her in captivity and saying nothing. The season runs across three timelines, one day per year, before and after.

Season one is one of the meanest, most efficient teen thrillers ever made, and the central question is beautifully unanswerable: one of these girls is lying, and the show is genuinely in no rush to tell you which. Season two is a separate story with a new cast — watchable, less essential.

Best watched: in a weekend, because the plot is engineered to make you hit "next episode" against your own will.

Station Eleven (2021 · HBO Max)

The setup: A flu pandemic kills most of the world in a matter of weeks. Twenty years later, a woman named Kirsten travels the Great Lakes with a nomadic troupe performing Shakespeare for survivor settlements. The show constantly jumps back to the night everything collapsed and to the child she was then, and slowly connects a handful of strangers who had no idea they were connected.

The gentlest thing on this list and, for my money, the best. It's a psychological survival drama about what people carry rather than what they eat — the running argument being whether art is a luxury or the actual point of surviving. Devastating without being cruel.

Best watched: when you can pay attention. The timeline hops reward it.

Class of '07 (2023 · Prime Video)

The setup: A group of Australian women return to their old all-girls high school on a hilltop for a ten-year reunion. While they're standing around resenting each other over cheap wine, an apocalyptic tidal wave floods the world below. Now they're stranded at school with the people who ruined their adolescence, flashbacks and all.

It's a comedy, and it's still a survival thriller — the joke being that adult women reduced to rationing pantry snacks revert to their exact teenage social hierarchy within about four hours. Eight short episodes, sharp as anything, criminally under-seen.

Yellowjackets overlap: the group dynamics, played for laughs that curdle.

Ensemble Female-Led Psychological Dramas

Here the premise matters less than the room. An ensemble female cast where every woman has her own agenda, her own lie, and a very specific reason for staying in a friendship that costs her something.

Bad Sisters (2022– · Apple TV+)

The setup: Four Dublin sisters spend a season trying to murder the fifth sister's husband — a controlling, sadistic man they all refer to as "the Prick." The show opens at his funeral and then rewinds, so you know from minute one that he dies. What you don't know is which attempt worked, or whether any of them did it. Two insurance investigators are asking the same question for less noble reasons.

Very funny, then abruptly not. The sisters bicker like people who have known each other since birth, and the abuse storyline is handled with an unusual amount of care for a show this comedic.

Best watched: if you like a revenge plot where the plotters are catastrophically bad at it.

Big Little Lies (2017–2019 · HBO Max)

The setup: Three mothers in wealthy Monterey collide over a first-grade playground incident. Interspersed with the school-politics warfare are police interviews about a death at a school fundraiser — the show tells you someone got killed but withholds both victim and culprit until the finale.

The template a lot of these shows are still copying: gorgeous coastline, immaculate kitchens, and a domestic violence storyline that Nicole Kidman plays with such precision it stops being prestige television and starts being uncomfortable. Season one is close to perfect. Season two exists, has Meryl Streep, and is fine.

Yellowjackets overlap: women bound together by a secret none of them chose.

Dead to Me (2019–2022 · Netflix)

The setup: Jen's husband is killed in a hit-and-run. At a grief support group she meets Judy, a relentlessly warm woman who becomes her best friend. Judy was driving the car. The audience knows within one episode; Jen doesn't, and the show sits in that gap for three seasons.

A two-hander rather than an ensemble, but the friendship is the whole engine — two women whose loyalty keeps outpacing every rational reason to run. It's a dark comedy, and it earns its ending, which is more than most shows on this list can say.

Best watched: when you want the dread cut with jokes.

Mare of Easttown (2021 · HBO Max)

The setup: A detective in a small Pennsylvania town investigates the murder of a teenage single mother while a year-old missing girl case goes nowhere and the town openly blames her for it. Mare is also grieving her son, fighting her ex-daughter-in-law for custody of her grandson, and living with her mother, who has opinions.

The mystery is solid. The reason to watch is the ecosystem of women — mother, daughter, best friend, rivals — all of whom have known each other for forty years and cannot escape one another. Kate Winslet vapes in a parka and it's the performance of her career.

Yellowjackets overlap: small-town memory as a form of surveillance.

If You Want More Ambiguous, Unsettling Endings

For the viewers whose favorite thing about Yellowjackets is that it will not confirm whether anything supernatural is happening.

Sharp Objects (2018 · HBO Max)

The setup: A St. Louis crime reporter in fragile recovery returns to her Missouri hometown to cover the murders of two girls. She moves back in with her mother, a Southern hostess with a lethal instinct for cruelty, and her thirteen-year-old half-sister, who runs the town's teenagers like a small operation.

Eight episodes of heat haze, bourbon in water bottles, and a mother-daughter relationship that functions as a slow poisoning. The final reveal lands in the last thirty seconds and then in a mid-credits shot most people missed on first watch.

Content note: self-harm is central here and the show does not soften it.

The OA (2016–2019 · Netflix)

The setup: A young woman who disappeared for seven years returns to her hometown. She was blind when she vanished; she can see now. She recruits five people to meet in an abandoned house at night, where she tells them what happened to her — a story involving captivity, near-death experiences, and a set of interpretive movements that supposedly open a door between dimensions.

Either she's telling the truth or she isn't, and the show hands you evidence for both. Netflix cancelled it on a cliffhanger, so the ambiguity is now permanent, which fans are still processing.

Best watched: with your suspension of disbelief fully armed.

Top of the Lake (2013–2017 · Prime Video / Sundance Now in select regions)

The setup: A detective returns to the New Zealand lake town she grew up in and takes on the case of a pregnant twelve-year-old who walks into freezing water, then disappears. The girl's father runs the local drug trade. There's also a women's commune on disputed land, led by a guru played, magnificently, by Holly Hunter.

Jane Campion directs, so it's beautiful and extremely patient, and the resolution answers the case while leaving the larger rot fully intact.

Yellowjackets overlap: the wilderness as a character with a grudge.

If you want the same darkness with a lighter touch and considerably more deadpan, that's a different lane — covered in Shows Like Wednesday: Dark, Weird, and Witty.

Start with The Wilds if you want the structure, Station Eleven if you want to feel something, and Sharp Objects if you want to be unwell about it for a week.