Earlier this year, TIME wrote, "'Yellowjackets' — like so much recent TV about young women, matriarchy, and the mixed blessing of personal empowerment — also forces us to consider whether its girls might have been better off in the off-grid society they created for themselves." And given those themes, the friends I mostly discuss the show with, trading theories and memes over long message threads, are women. Some men I've tried to share the Showtime hit with have been less than enthusiastic, which has occasionally been mirrored in critics' responses, especially when the show first aired.
If you tell him you're going to book club, he believes you're going to book club.
It's unclear if their reticence is old-fashioned sexism, an unwillingness to engage with trauma and its aftermath, or something else perhaps related to the show's centering of women, girls and violence. Matthew Jacobs called the show "inessential" in his review for TV Guide, while Brian Lowry of CNN described it as "a disappointment" though its "stars still merit a look."
Good news, men. A hero has arisen from the ashes of Flight 2525 (well, technically he arose from the smoldering home fires back in New Jersey, where he was left). He's ordinary and he's awesome. It's Jeff! And he's here to elevate white man mediocrity. Look out, guys. There's someone new, supportive and extraordinary just by being ordinary in town.
"Yellowjackets," now in its second season, follows the high school girls of a champion 1996 soccer team whose plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness. The survivors turn to desperate measures to make it through the harsh winter, and the show follows two main threads: the 1996 woodsy trauma and what happens to all the survivors later as adults. Spoiler alert: they don't feel or do so great.
As the husband of our main Wiskayok star, Shauna, Warren Kole is Jeff. He runs a furniture store. He married his high school sweetheart. Well, technically he married the girl he was cheating on his high school sweetheart with. But he did marry the mother of his (possibly multiple) children. He married young and has stayed married in the face of difficulties. He has the floppy hair of a YA love interest (perhaps a nod to Shauna's teenage dreams), despite being in his 40s. Jeff is the definition of peaked in high school, the golden boy who never left town and never did much. He's also done everything.
Warren Kole as Jeff Sadecki and Alex Wyndham as Kevyn Tan in "Yellowjackets" (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)Jeff is every man. Specifically, he's every man in a TV show led by women. He's Dean Boland to glamourous criminal mastermind Beth Boland of "Good Girls," Rob to mayor Margot in "The Power." Jeff is not the main attraction. He doesn't get the teary, intense, Emmy-worthy speeches (that's Melanie Lynskey's Shauna). He doesn't get to wave the gun around (OK, that's Shauna too). He's not the action star or any star. His attempt to do crimes ended badly, and with him covered in glitter. Shauna thought he was cheating on her (Jeff would never), but he was simply fumblingly trying to blackmail her friends. It didn't end well. Nothing Jeff does ends well but he keeps on trying, the Energizer Bunny of husbands.
He understands more than any male character in recent memory: trauma changes you.
Jeff is a simple man. He works out at the gym. He's excited about making sales at work. When he gets upset, he deals with his anger by listening to Papa Roach alone in his car and violently air drumming. He enjoys eating dinner with his family, and when the women in his life, Shauna and defiant teen daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) tell him things, he believes them. Jeff is a believer. His exterior of tanned, floppy commonness conceals a steadfast heart of gold. He's pure. If you tell him you're going to book club, he believes you're going to book club. Why would you lie to him? Why would you murder? (If you do, though, he's got you.)
Jeff supports his wife through an avalanche of devastating revelations. She had an affair. She murdered a guy. Not only does he not leave Shauna upon the news of her cheating, he doesn't leave after the killing either. He does what he can to support his family. He's read her teen diaries, trying to understand the most difficult and life-altering trauma of her life, which not every man would do or care to know about. That trauma includes Shauna eating his high school girlfriend. Again, not every man is going to get over that.
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But Jeff's got Shauna's back. And in doing so, perhaps he understands more than any male character in recent memory: trauma changes you. Violence is forever. Shauna is the way she is (secretive, hypervigilant, occasionally violent and cold) because of the past, and the past is always with her. Jeff accepts her for who she is, not the idealized way she could have been if only those terrible events hadn't happened, if only that plane hadn't crashed and everybody got real hungry. Jeff is the evolved man, the ally who has done the work (reading the diaries! Burning the diaries! Cleaning up the murder/affair evidence!).
He's willing to try new things, like strawberry lube. He's amendable to change, to doing the work. He wants it all to work out, and he loves Shauna because, as he says, she's the smartest woman he's ever met. Jeff is a blueprint for a way to be a good man. Rise himbo, rise. Not all heroes wear capes. Some of them wear sleeveless hoodies.
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