A brilliant cast lead this outrageously fun gorefest, which navigates a 90s-to-present-day timeline with laughs, panache – and exploding planes

What’s not to love about Yellowjackets (Sky Atlantic), a series largely driven by the central mystery of which teenage girl has been eaten, and who ordered the eating? The US horror/thriller/drama, which is also truly a comedy (is it so wrong to laugh at an exploding plane?), has acquired a big following over the course of its first season. It tells the story of a girls’ high-school football team, whose plane crashes while they’re travelling to a national tournament, leaving survivors stranded in the wilderness, having to fight for their lives. Think of it as a hybrid of The Craft and The Island with Bear Grylls, or Lost – with intentional jokes – plus a hint of Big Little Lies, if that had more of an interest in cannibalism than property porn.

I can’t remember the last time a TV series offered such unadulterated and outrageous fun. It even manages to navigate one of contemporary television’s most irritating trends, the split timeline, with style and panache. Half of the action takes place in 1996, starting out as a retro teen drama in the run-up to the crash, morphing into a folk-horror gorefest once the girls (and the odd boy or two) are right there in the thick of it. The other half takes place 25 years later, in the present day, as some of the women who made it out alive have to work out who knows what about the terrible things they did while they were stranded, and who is trying to blackmail them about it.