This Underrated 2-Season Prime Video Thriller Series Did 'Yellowjackets' Before Showtime Could

This Underrated 2-Season Prime Video Thriller Series Did 'Yellowjackets' Before Showtime Could Tai looking at Nat with Van, Melissa and Shauna behind herImage via Paramount+ By  Jennie Richardson Published 34 minutes ago Jennie Richardson is a TV Features and Lists Writer for Collider, and a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Fiction Writing. In other words, she really loves stories.  Sign in to your Collider account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

Since The Lord of the Flies, the teen survivalist drama has been a beloved but underrated subgenre. Survivalist TV shows are exciting because they show people trying to stay alive while stranded in the wilderness, and often turning on each other and even resorting to killing each other in the process. Lost perfected the telling of this type of story for television, as it explored overarching moral and ethical questions, saw many of the characters causing their own and each other's downfalls on the island, and gave the island its own history and powers.

Yellowjackets has since taken over as the current hit survivalist drama, but its survival storyline occurs in the show's teen timeline, where emotions are heightened, and the characters behave in irrational ways often based on these heightened emotions. This has resulted in what the show is best known for: the Yellowjackets' cannibalistic wilderness cult. Before Yellowjackets, though, there was The Wilds: a thoughtful, emotional survivalist teen drama that was sadly cancelled after just two seasons.

What Is Prime Video's 'The Wilds' About?

The Wilds follows a group of teenage girls who are on their way to the Dawn of Eve, a retreat for empowering young women, when their plane crashes, and they are stranded on a deserted island. There are nine of them in total: twin sisters Rachel (Reign Edwards) and Nora (Helena Howard), best friends Toni (Erana James) and Martha (Jenna Clause), Dot (Shannon Berry), Shelby (Mia Healey), Fatin (Sophia Ali), Leah (Sarah Pidgeon), and Jeanette (Chi Nguyen). In the show's first episode, the girls wind up stranded on the island, and Jeanette dies of injuries that she sustained in the crash. The girls then struggle to figure out how they're going to survive, and whether they'll ever be able to get off the island. All the while, the show balances between this and two additional timelines: the past timeline that shows a glimpse of each girl's life before the plane crash, and a future timeline that shows the girls being interviewed after being rescued.

What sets The Wilds apart from other survivalist TV shows is that the plane crash was no accident — the conference was never even real. The entire thing is an experiment by former college professor Gretchen Klein (Rachel Griffiths) to see how the girls will act while stranded, in order to prove her gender essentialist hypothesis. For the experiment to work, the girls have been kept in the dark about the fact that the crash was intentional, and they don't know if they will ever even be rescued. Among the group, none of the girls know that the crash was intentional, except for Gretchen's two undercover operatives. One is Jeanette, who is really a graduate student named Linh who's been helping Gretchen with the study. The other operative is one of the other eight girls, but her identity is left a mystery for the entirety of the first season.

The Wilds' main timeline shows the girls struggling to survive while clashing with each other, as Gretchen monitors them through hidden cameras. Each episode, the flashbacks give focus to one of the girls' lives, showing how she struggled leading up to the plane crash. Each girl is there for a reason: she got to a particularly low point in her outside life, so she was attending the retreat as a fresh start after this especially difficult moment. The show's future timeline all takes place while the girls are being interviewed about the crash and being stranded, and it recontextualizes the events of the present while opening more questions about the future.

'The Wilds' and 'Yellowjackets' Use the Same Premise To Explore Very Different Themes

Misty Quigley gives a fake smile with one of Walter's chocolate martinis in Yellowjackets.Image via Showtime

While The Wilds and Yellowjackets are both drama series about teenage girls stranded in the wilderness, both series, at their core, are very different. The Wilds is more about the underlying experiment at play, and how, in spite of the odds, the girls come together to heal and help each other when away from the people and problems that brought them there. Yellowjackets, on the other hand, has its plane crash survivors in much worse conditions. They don't have access to the same resources that the girls in The Wilds do, and rather than lean on community to survive, they seek comfort in a disturbing religious cult that treats the wilderness as a god. As such, this has disastrous consequences that go on to affect them decades later. The Wilds' future timeline takes place immediately after they've been rescued, though, so everything is much more immediate in the flash-forwards.

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Posts By  Miranda Adama Mar 28, 2025

The Wilds may have been short-lived, but it still made quite a dent in the space of survivalist TV dramas. The show's main twist drives everything, even as most of the girls have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. In The Wilds, it's not so much a question of whether the girls ever escaped the island, or, like with Yellowjackets, how they escaped. Instead, the questions at the center of The Wilds are whether the girls will ever find out that it is an experiment, if being stranded will change them, and what will happen with the experiment. For those looking for a similar show to watch while waiting for Yellowjackets Season 4, The Wilds is the perfect choice. Both shows examine what happens when teenage girls are stranded in the wilderness, and both shows see the stranded parties both coming together and clashing with one another (though The Wilds doesn't have any cannibalism or human sacrifice). At the center of both shows are complex female characters struggling with impossible new environments, making for two excellent survivalist dramas.

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The Wilds

Like Follow Followed Adventure Mystery Drama Release Date 2020 - 2022-00-00 Network Amazon Prime Video Showrunner Amy Harris Directors Sophia Ali

Cast

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• Rachel Griffiths
• David Sullivan
• Tanner Ray Rook
• Helena Howard

Genres Adventure, Mystery, Drama Powered by Expand Collapse

• TV Features
• The Wilds
• Yellowjackets

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