When Brilliant Shows Lose Their Way: Yellowjackets and Severance

Some Shows Die in Fire. Some in Smoke. Right Now, I’m Watching Both (spoilers ahead!)

Two of my recent obsessions: Yellowjackets and Severance; both felt like the kind of TV that could rewire you. Season 1 of each was strange, defiant, unforgettable. I binged them like I was starving. I told friends, you have to watch this. I thought: this is why we still gather around screens. And then… the slump. Different shows, different styles, but the same ache in my stomach: brilliance fading. The important thing is how they lost their edge. Yellowjackets scattered. Severance stalled. Two different ways of killing tension, both equally deadly.

 

Yellowjackets: lost in the wilderness 

Season 1 was feral brilliance. The set-up was brutal and simple: a plane full of teenage soccer players crashes in the wilderness. They’re stranded. They’re hungry. They’re cold. And the descent into violence and ritual begins. The past and present timelines folded together perfectly. The teen girls slipping from survival into cannibalism, the adult survivors carrying scars and secrets they couldn’t name. Every cut between timelines was a knife: what happened to them? Who made it out alive? What did they do to each other? It was TV that understood dread. You could feel the woods breathing, pressing in on them. The wilderness wasn’t scenery; it was predator. 

Season 2 wasn’t as tight, but it still had moments. The feral edge flickered here and there. The hunger scenes, the visions—flashes of that old danger. But already there was scatter. Cults, love triangles, endless side stories. Threads multiplying. The beast of the wilderness slipping into the background. 

And now Season 3. The ultimate disappointment. Instead of course-correcting, it doubled down on scatter. More storylines than it knows what to do with. More filler. The pacing drags. The urgency is gone. The violence feels toothless, recycled. The danger doesn’t creep the way it once did; it just… sits. Big swings that land flat: cult detours that lead nowhere, vision sequences stretched long past their tension point, adult characters bogged down in half-baked arcs. Even the “big moments” (deaths, confrontations, revelations) arrive without bite. 

In Season 1, every loss felt carved into bone. In Season 3, it’s like watching set pieces shuffle across the board. And then there’s Shauna. Somewhere between Seasons 2 and 3, she morphed into the show’s chosen villain. Shauna the ultimate psychopathic villain. Shauna as scapegoat. But the turn doesn’t land because it feels forced, not earned. Instead of trusting Shauna’s complexity, the writers flattened her into TikTok’s idea of a villain. It felt less like story and more like pandering. 

Juliette Lewis leaving didn’t help. Natalie was the wild card (and my favourite), the one who carried tension between chaos and survival, and when Lewis stepped away, the writers seemed clueless. So they killed her. Just like that. And the show has been staggering since. 

Even the casting disconnect nags at me. People love to say young Shauna and adult Shauna are so alike, but they’re not, not in face, not in mannerism. They feel like two entirely different characters who happened to inherit the same name. That lack of continuity makes the “then/now” structure harder to buy into, especially when the adult timeline itself drags. Because let’s be honest: the adult timeline is boring compared to the teen one. Always has been, but in Season 3 it’s glaring. The trial storyline, dragging on until the inevitable guilty verdict; it eats time without raising stakes. Imagine if the entire season had just been the teen timeline, lean and feral, with only the occasional adult scene as punctuation. It would have been sharper, more devastating. 

The wilderness itself, which once felt alive and hungry, has been reduced to backdrop. A mood board. The sense that the forest was frightening has evaporated. Instead we’re drowning in scatter: plotlines branching out in every direction, none of them tightening. I wanted the wilderness to breathe down my neck again, to feel that suffocating dread that made Season 1 impossible to turn away from. Instead, I’m restless, catching myself scrolling my phone. And when you’re watching a show about hunger, madness, and ritual, but you’re bored enough to check your notifications?! That’s the real horror. 

The cast still bleeds for this show, the performances are strong. But scatter kills urgency. Season 3 turned what was once a beast into a backdrop.

 

Severance: stuck in the office 

Then there’s Severance. Season 1 was one of the strangest, smartest things I’ve ever seen. The premise alone — splitting a person’s consciousness into a “work self” (innie) and “home self” (outie) — was unsettling. But the execution was masterful. The sterile office with its endless hallways. The bizarre rituals (waffle parties, music-dance experiences) that felt both hilarious and horrifying. The characters slowly realising they were prisoners of their own divided minds. It was satire, dystopia, and emotional horror rolled into one. 

And that finale. Oh God, that finale. The “innies” briefly waking into their outies’ lives — Mark holding the truth of his wife in his hands, Helly about to expose Lumon in front of a crowd — and then snap, blackout. Perfect cliffhanger. 

Season 2 should have been explosive. Revolution. Consequences. Instead… it stalled. The atmosphere was still thick, the score still chilling, the sets still uncanny. But nothing moved. Endless circling. Prolonged silences. Teases without payoffs. What was claustrophobic in Season 1 — a deliberate artistic chokehold — became hesitation in Season 2. And the plotting itself sagged. 

For all its talk of “the goats” and mysteries of consciousness, the show couldn’t quite connect the threads. Scenes stretched past tension into tedium. Mark (Adam Scott) killing a man, trapped in an elevator with blood smeared across him, only to pivot into saving his wife and then running hand-in-hand with Helly through those endless corridors — where to? To what end? Escape into another hallway? Another closed door? 

The imagery wanted to be mythic, but it read like a writers’ room circling a whiteboard. What should have been an escalation of everything Season 1 promised ended up a loop. Characters circling, waiting. Viewers circling, waiting. Where Yellowjackets gave me too many threads, Severance gave me too much slack. 

Scatter vs stall. Both are fatal.

This is the part that sticks with me: tension in storytelling is compression and release. You squeeze tighter and tighter, then you let something break. Yellowjackets forgot the compression. Severance forgot the release. Scatter (Yellowjackets) makes you stop caring. Too many side plots, too many mysteries piled up, none of them sharp enough to pierce. You drown in noise. 

Stall (Severance) makes you stop hoping. The mystery is there, but it never cracks open. You wait, and wait, and wait. Eventually you lose faith that the story even knows where it’s going. Scatter kills urgency. Stall kills hope. Different mistakes, same end result: tension dies.

 

Why it stings more with these shows 

Most TV is fine. Background noise. Easy to let go if it gets worse. But these shows weren’t fine — they were rare. Both Yellowjackets and Severance dared to be weird. They trusted their audiences to sit with discomfort, to live with unanswered questions. They weren’t built to please algorithms. They were bold. That’s why the fall hurts more. When you’ve tasted something that sharp, something that alive, it’s brutal to feel it thin out. You can still see the brilliance in flashes — an actor’s face, a haunting image, a line that stabs — but it’s buried. You’re left with echoes of what it was. 

Yellowjackets hurts the most, maybe, because Season 3 proved the decline wasn’t a fluke. It’s not just mid-season sag. It’s structural. The fire that roared in Season 1 has thinned into smoke. Severance still has time, maybe, to break free from its stall. But with Yellowjackets, the disappointment feels sealed.

Will I keep watching? Probably. That’s the curse of loving television at its best. You keep hoping for the spark to come back. You remember how it felt when it burned, and you wait for the ember to catch again. Maybe Season 4 of Yellowjackets (if it survives that long) will strip away the clutter and remember the wilderness is supposed to devour us. Maybe Severance will finally stop circling and smash the door open. I want them both to recover. Because here’s the truth: for all my frustration, these are still the best TV shows I’ve watched recently. Even in decline, they’re braver than most of the glossy, forgettable stuff out there. And when they land a scene — even now — they remind me of what television can do. But right now? One scattered. One stalled. Two different roads to the same disappointment.

Final thought

Season 1s are fire. By Season 3, sometimes all you’re left with is smoke. And maybe I keep watching because I’m stubborn, or maybe because it’s rare to love anything on TV this much. Even when it lets you down, you can’t quite look away.