“I remember the first time I tried to write a screenplay, I took a class in college,” Ashley Lyle recalls. As an English major at Columbia University in New York, Lyle found herself in a screenwriting class after dropping an overly challenging art history course. “I immediately loved it. I already loved movies. Kim’s Video was my haunt in New York.”
For her writing partner Bart Nickerson, the path began with a childhood love of television and movies. “TV and movies, for as long as I can remember, were a big deal,” he explains. His journey started with writing “short and terrible” pieces as a child, eventually leading to improv comedy and sketch writing, his first introduction to script format.
Their individual paths converged through mutual friends in their home state of New Jersey, where Nickerson was performing improv comedy. “Bart was very mysterious for a few years because he was working at the Jersey Shore. His parents had a snack stand on the boardwalk,” Lyle remembers.
Bart Nickerson. Photo by Justin Bettman/ Getty Images for Paramount+ with Showtime
The pair finally met at an annual party thrown by a mutual friend, a gathering they affectionately call “Beer Christmas,” which eventually became the name of their production company. “Everyone brings as interesting a can of beer as you can,” Lyle explains of the tradition that has evolved over more than two decades.
The Power of Partnership
From the beginning, Lyle and Nickerson recognized the benefits of working as a team, both creatively and strategically. “It was nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of,” Nickerson shares. “There is that sort of paralysis that you can go into when you’re alone: Is this good, is this at the point that it needs to be before it is worth showing? A partner is really great for that.”
The duo also saw practical advantages to forming a writing partnership. “It was strategic at first because we knew we wanted to move to LA,” Lyle states. “What we had heard was that it ups your chance of being staffed if you’re a team because you only get paid as one person.” The pay, of course, can also be a con.
Their collaborative writing process has evolved over the years. “When we first started writing together, we had the most inefficient process humanly possible,” Lyle admits. They would each write their own version of every scene, then cherry-pick the best lines and jokes to merge them together. While creatively fruitful, it proved incredibly time-consuming.
Now, they take turns leading on drafts. “We don’t ever just split things where I write my part, Bart writes his part. We’re both writing all of it all the time,” Lyle adds. This approach gives them a distinct advantage, delivering highly polished drafts that helped them secure numerous script assignments early in their career.
Nickerson adds that their different perspectives strengthen their work. “When we have landed on something that we both really like, I feel like our confidence in it is very high.” This shared confidence helps them maintain their creative vision when navigating the complex world of television development and production.
[More: “Female Friendship and Female Rage” Ashley Lyle & Bart Nickerson On ‘Yellowjackets’]
From Comedy to Yellowjackets
The writing team’s career path has taken some unexpected turns. “We moved out with our trunk full of Scrubs, 30 Rock, My Name Is Earl scripts,” Nickerson recalls of their arrival in Los Angeles just before the 2008 Writers’ Strike. They initially focused on comedy specs – sample episodes of existing shows designed to showcase their ability to write in established voices.
When an agent asked if they had any original material, they quickly wrote a pilot in “a week or two” that Nickerson describes as “teen supernatural.” This decision unwittingly altered their career trajectory. “Not even remotely understanding that we were absolutely changing the arc of our career with this one one-hour kind of teen supernatural pilot.”
Ashley Lyle. Photo by Kailey Schwerman/ Paramount+ with Showtime
The pilot, titled The Devil You Know, showed their affinity for genre storytelling – a thread that eventually led to Yellowjackets. Before creating their hit Showtime series, they worked on shows including The Originals, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, and Dispatches from Elsewhere.
“People often say to us, ‘Oh your careers are all over the place,'” Lyle notes. “But we try to add humor. We often say in the writers’ room, ‘Yellowjackets is a comedy.’ It’s a very, very dark comedy to our minds.” Despite the apparent diversity in their credits, Lyle believes “there’s more of a through line to all of those than maybe immediately meets the eye.”
Throughout their television careers, they were often known as “the funny people in the drama room,” bringing humor to even the darkest material. This sensibility is evident in Yellowjackets, which balances its harrowing survival story with sharp wit and dark comedy.
One of the most distinctive features of Yellowjackets is its dual timeline structure, which follows the same characters both as teenagers stranded after a plane crash and as adults 25 years later. This approach was present “from very early on,” according to Nickerson.
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“The biggest problem is that on a certain level, you are writing two shows,” Nickerson explains. These parallel narratives have “their own sort of life and needs and demands from a narrative standpoint.” The challenge comes in connecting these timelines coherently.
“You move something in the past and it shows up in the future,” he says. “But then it’s actually a two-way street. If somebody is afraid of spiders and that gets revealed in the present-day storyline, then you need to justify it to a certain extent in the past storyline.”
What Makes a Great Spec?
“When you’re reading hundreds of pilots for staffing, there tend to be scripts that just repeat,” Lyle shares. “You get seven or eight sexy assassin scripts, and no matter how good the sexy assassin script is, by page three when it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s gonna kill this guy because she’s a sexy assassin,’ you’re like, ‘Oh, no…more of these.'”
What catches their attention are unique premises with compelling execution. Lyle cites examples from writers they’ve hired. “Sarah [L. Thompson] wrote a really great pilot called Boobs – a Madmen-esque story of the doctor who pioneered breast implants.” Another standout was Red State, a Mars mission drama centered on a moral dilemma about whether to sacrifice an irritating crew member to save resources.
Nickerson is drawn to specific moments that reveal a writer’s investment in their work. “When you can feel that the person writing this really wanted to or had some amount of… it’s like passion is not even the right word because to me, writing often feels almost like a compulsion.”
For aspiring television writers, Lyle and Nickerson emphasize attention to detail. “I hate a spec where it feels like the stage direction is tossed off,” Lyle shares. “Put care into every word, put care into the way you’re describing what’s happening, the way you’re describing where your characters are, the world that they’re in.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
