'Riverdale on steroids': Yellowjackets went from the next Lost to a show its fans want over

Someone on r/television asked, in good faith, whether Yellowjackets' present-day storyline gets more interesting. The answers were a eulogy in progress: "They both get worse," with the adult timeline dismissed as padding — "It is pretty much agreed the Adult tl is Riverdale on steroids."

The mood around the finale matters more than any single plot complaint, and one reply caught it exactly:

"Pretty much everyone loved the first season and now we are all thinking for final season 'come on let's get this over with'"

— a commenter on r/television

That's a brutal arc for this particular show. Season 1 landed in 2021 as prestige TV's next obsession — seven Emmy nominations including Best Drama, instant Lost comparisons, two timelines humming in sync. Season 4, now confirmed as the last, premieres on Showtime November 20 (Paramount+ premium subscribers get it November 18), and the dominant fan emotion is the one usually reserved for dental work.

The adult timeline was the design flaw

My position, and I'll die on this hillside: the present-day storyline should have been cut back in season 2. The 1996 wilderness timeline has always been the show — hunger, frostbite, the slow slide into ritual. The adult timeline existed to deliver the mystery of who survived, and once that mystery thinned, it had nothing left to do except generate subplots, which is how you get to "Riverdale on steroids."

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The show even seems to half-know it. Season 4's casting spree — Hilary Swank as adult Melissa, Molly Ringwald, June Squibb, Dulé Hill — is all reinforcements for the timeline fans want less of, the TV equivalent of rebuilding the deck on a sinking half of the ship. Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, announcing the end, said their responsibility "is to listen" to the story; one Substack reviewer's season 3 verdict — "Incompetent Writers Tank a Fantastic Series" — suggests parts of the audience felt the listening started late.

Season 1 of Yellowjackets earned seven Emmy nominations. The final season's premiere gift from fans is "let's get this over with."

Watch it anyway — selectively

Here's my practical advice for November 20: the wilderness half of this show never stopped working, and a final season means the 1996 timeline finally has to show its ending — the thing even exhausted fans still want to see. The adult scenes have a skip button, and after three seasons, you've earned the right to use it. A show this good at its core deserves to be finished; it just doesn't deserve to be finished in full.

Previously we wrote: Borgen vs Borgen: Power and Glory — is it a new show, and do you need to watch the original first?