When Will ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Premiere?

Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Tawny Cypress as Taissa, Juliette Lewis as Natalie, Christina Ricci as Misty in Yellowjackets
Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME

It’s been two days since the Yellowjackets Season 1 finale aired, and we’re already counting down to the show’s return. (The good news is that it has already been renewed.) After all, the trippy, intense, and very wild drama did what it did for the previous nine episodes: left us wanting more.

But when exactly will we see it back on our screens?

“We are working towards a premiere at the end of 2022,” Showtime Networks president of entertainment Gary Levine told Vulture. “We’d love to stay on an annual cycle. I think our audiences deserve that, and I also think that when you have a show that has this kind of a momentum, you don’t want to let it dissolve.”

And it sounds like he’s thinking beyond a second season. “The finale is a very satisfying finale, but it leaves lots of runway. Yes, the show is sort of high concept, but it is also a character piece about the dynamics between characters when they’re tested, both in the wilderness and in adulthood. You can write those kinds of dynamics forever,” he said. “This is not reliant upon, ‘What’s the answer to the secret?’ This has many secrets, many surprises, and a real human dimension that has longevity built into it.”

The first season ended with, in the present-day timeline, Natalie (Juliette Lewis) being kidnapped by followers of fellow Yellowjacket Lottie (Courtney Eaton as a teen). That all but confirmed that we’re going to meet Lottie as an adult in Season 2. “We are certainly entertaining that notion, yes,” co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco told TV Insider, adding that we could see a survivor we have yet to meet in the present play a major role going forward.

Meanwhile, in the 1996 timeline, Jackie (Ella Purnell) froze to death after leaving the cabin following a fight with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse). Chances are the Season 2 premiere won’t begin with the others eating her, though Lisco hasn’t completely ruled that out.

“I think you will see the young women in the 1996 storyline start to engage in a more brutal form of social hierarchy and as things in the woods get more stressful and as they’re put under more duress, we may inevitably see them factionalize more into groups,” he teased. “Then following that into the 2021 storyline, the new survivors who show up may be carrying some of those old wounds into the present.”

Yellowjackets, Season 2, TBA, Showtime