'Beef' is less rare in Season 2, but still well done

By Aisha Harris

There was something special about Lee Sung Jin's Beef when it premiered on Netflix in 2023. The sometimes surreal but always emotionally grounded dramedy was premised upon how one minor, negative interaction between strangers — in that case, a road rage incident involving a struggling contractor (Steven Yeun) and a well-to-do business owner (Ali Wong) — can open the floodgates for misdirected anger and surface long unexamined disappointments and unrelated resentments. It tapped into something both mundane and potent, cleverly dramatizing a general sense of societal chaos via two richly-rendered Asian American leads.

Three years later, and Season 2 finds Lee swapping in an entirely new cast while pivoting the locus of ire. At its center are two couples: Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), the married general manager and interior designer of a Montecito, Calif. country club, and fiancés Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), low-level staff members at the club. In the opening episode, the latter couple accidentally happen upon Josh and Lindsay having a nasty drag-out fight that, from outside looking in, appears on the verge of turning violent.

As Beef reiterates many times in various ways, Austin and Ashley are Gen Z — so, naturally they capture the argument on video. The video's existence is the first small cut of beef, which quickly ripples out to meatier and more consequential beefs, entanglements and manipulations. The younger pair, dissatisfied with their low wages and lack of health benefits, sees an opportunity to leverage what they've documented, and they do. But Josh and Lindsay have a lot more drama going on besides a sexless, unhappy marriage; despite their proximity to wealth and seemingly cushy lifestyle, they're drowning in debt, and Josh's employment at the club is in limbo as his contract nears its end. Predictably, both couples turn to extreme (and extremely illegal) measures to meet their wants and needs.

Season 1 was equally, if not more so, interested in the knotty personal lives of Yeun's Danny and Wong's Amy, apart from their beef with one another. Season 2 benefits from taking this same approach, though with far more primary characters to flesh out and intertwining storylines to serve, it can become unwieldy. To get across a heavily underlined message that "capitalism is soul-sucking," an entirely separate and somewhat uninspired international plot dovetails with the quartet's mess. Still, it's fun to see Youn Yuh-jung lean into her role as Chairwoman Park, the shrewd and menacing billionaire owner of the club whose own dirty laundry drives much of the high-octane action in the back half of the season. (Ditto the great Song Kang-ho as Dr. Kim, the chairwoman's much younger husband who has a poignant moment in a late episode.)

The digs at capitalism probably feel overdone because of how the media landscape looks now. It seems as if nearly every show or movie in recent memory throws in a corrupt wealthy person (or several) to comment on the disparities between the haves and have nots (The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, The Girlfriend) or presents middle-aged married couples wading through malaise and regret (DTF St. Louis, Fleishman Is In Trouble, plenty of Nicole Kidman projects). But it also seems like this iteration of Beef struggles with narrative substance on its own; while the exact details of how its story shakes out aren't easily predictable, some of the emotional novelty has worn off by the time we arrive at any twists. (This is also true of some of its wry observations on cultural identity, which come off rote and obvious — a running gag is that Isaac's Josh and Melton's Austin are frequently perceived as ethnically ambiguous to white people. Isaac is Cuban and Guatemalan; Melton is white and Korean.)

Season 2 is compelling enough largely because its stars gamely tap into the spirit of the show's M.O.; at any given moment, each character may reveal the worst of themselves, which looks different for everyone. Josh, for one, is an avoidant personality whose contempt simmers ominously for the demanding one percenter clientele he serves at the club, yet when he does explode, the limber and expressive Oscar Isaac lets him rip. In contrast, Carey Mulligan's Lindsay is clearly exhausted from putting on airs as if everything between them is fine, and resentful of the sacrifices she feels she's made for her increasingly distant husband at the expense of the dreams they once shared.

Lee Sung Jin and his writing team have added nice touches when it comes to Ashley and Austin, too — their relative youth reveals that media literacy and basic life skills are seriously lacking, all of which makes for silly comedic bits that Spaeny and Melton carry through handily. But even better is when the cracks in their "perfect," non-confrontational relationship widen into a gaping abyss, reflecting and refracting that of their older counterparts.

"Couples fight. It's normal," Lindsay insists to Josh in the first episode, right after they realize Austin and Ashley were in the audience for their domestic row. Neither couple is as stable as they've convinced themselves they are. In its best moments, the show leans into this: depicting people who are actively avoiding reality until they're forced to confront it by the skin of their teeth.