Mike Bockoven’s book Fantasticland is one of my favorites. It takes the concept of Lord of the Flies and plops is right down in an imagined Disney World competitor theme park whose employees get cut off from civilization due to a hurricane. It explores what happens when once normal college-aged kids divide into Mad Max-esque factions to fight for survival. I’ve long thought that, in the right hands, this story would make for an incredible movie. But though an ambitious theater company in California took it on as a play earlier this year, there have been no murmurs about Fantasticland making it to the big screen.

However, it seems like Showtime is going to take up the concept with their new series Yellowjackets, and it looks like this could be the savage girl thriller we all need.

Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson (Narcos), the ten-episode series tell the tale of a wildly talented high school girls’ soccer team who become the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the remote northern wilderness. The story follows their descent from a complicated but thriving team to savage clans, while also tracking the lives they’ve attempted to piece back together nearly 25 years later; proving that “the past is never really past and what began out in the wilderness is far from over.”

Okay, this is very different from Fantasticland, but the Lord of the Flies concept remains, made all the more intriguing as this is taken from a girl’s perspective – and frankly there is nothing more brutal than high school girls. The casting is just about perfect too.  Christina Ricci (The Addams Family, Sleepy Hollow), Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures), Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers) and Tawny Cypress (House of Cards) play the adult versions of the plane crash’s remaining survivors. Check them out in the extended trailer released last week…

The pilot episode which premiered last Sunday, November 14, was directed by Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body), which is just another reason to tune this one in. And if you needed to hear any more, the New York Times calls Yellowjackets a “bloody mix of survival saga, survivors’ journey, coming-of-age nostalgia, midlife-crisis exploration, dark-comic mystery and (maybe) ghost story — just for starters.”

See you in front of the telly…