This is a spoiler-free review of all eight episodes of Beef Season 2, which is now streaming on Netflix.
Beef Season 2 didn’t need to exist. The first season, starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun in career-topping performances as the equivalent of two human Beyblades crashing and spiraling around each other’s lives following a bit of road rage, blasted out of the gate fully formed and was easily one of the best TV shows of 2023 (and one of Netflix’s strongest offerings ever). It was a perfectly self-contained story full of juicy themes about the human condition that was not exactly begging for a follow-up.
So when Netflix announced that Beef was now an anthology and getting a second season, it was hard not to feel cynical about the streamer pouncing on the popularity of a hit limited series. It’s a move that, more often than not, fails to capture the magic of the first go-around. Even though Beef’s creator Lee Sung Jin was still holding the reins, it was still a big risk that comes with even higher expectations. That said, I’m relieved and thrilled to confirm that Beef Season 2 is really great, full of the same vigor of the first installment, even while it features new faces and new neuroticisms that lead to new, well, beef.
I would like to stop comparing the two seasons at some point soon because they each can stand firmly on their own — Season 2 would have also been a fantastic Season 1 — but it’s difficult not to when they’re cleverly pulling from the same playbook of semi-inconsequential details that is now, I suppose, the Beef house style. A character’s preoccupation with interior design; the looming terror of coyotes in Southern California; hell, even tumbling down a big hill. Most cheekily, there’s a near-miss car accident in the first episode that immediately deescalates into a scooching traffic game of “no, YOU go.” What’s remarkable is that it all works without feeling like a retread. Simply putting different characters in similar situations begets fundamental change.
What is brand new is the setting that Lee and his cadre of co-writers and directors plumb for their critique on late-stage capitalism. Across its eight episodes, Season 2 slithers through the sticky, gelatinous social strata of Monte Vista Point, an elite golf and country club near Santa Barbara. Squeezed in the center is the club’s general manager, Josh Martín (a locked-in Oscar Isaac), who has worked his way up to the managerial class over the years, along with his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (a delightfully loathsome Carey Mulligan), who doesn’t actually work there but has enmeshed herself with the clique of club wives to keep up the appearances of a supportive spouse despite a marriage on the rocks.
From above, the club’s demanding, wealthy, and high-profile clientele play friends (as long as it’s useful for them) while expecting Josh to be an ever-present concierge who will comp White Claws and arrange a round of 18 holes at peak hours with no pushback, and Lindsay to be a gossipy gal pal who can also speak to service workers on their behalf. Beef is constantly giving them exit ramps out from this “keep up with the Joneses” (but don’t outdo them either) lifestyle, but they reject every opportunity. They just can’t give it up.
At the lowest rung of the club’s hierarchy are Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley Miller and Charles Melton’s Austin Davis, both also giving mold-breaking performances as the newly engaged beverage cart girl and part-time trainer of MVP, whose naive bliss collapses when they accidentally witness a blowout fight between Josh and Lindsay that looks bad in person and worse on video. That sets up the cascade of attempted outmaneuvering between the two couples, who are both also trying to keep their own relationships on track. They’re all somewhat bad at it; everyone’s a little dumb, but they’re often muttering about how they think everyone else is dumb. It’s great.
Lee and co. have once again made the difficult job of weaving complex and ever-escalating storylines between and across an ensemble cast seem like easy work. Their script gives their actors no shortage of red meat to chew on while still being incredibly funny as they generally prod “the modern condition.” Isaac and Mulligan make for an excellent pair of elder millennials who still listen to M83 and talk about Hot Chip fondly, but have stalled out on the big dreams from early in their marriage. Melton — who, with Warfare, May December, and now this, has fully ascended from Riverdale/YA teen titles — is quite good as a people pleaser with low self-confidence because he can’t move past his own glory days as a college football athlete. And it’s incredibly fun to watch Spaeny, after so many heroine roles, play a try-hard who is the product of her unfortunate circumstances, but has spent too much time on therapy-Tok while doing little to actually help herself or quell her paranoias.
It’s these four characters’ selfish wants – whether it’s simply a $45k yearly salary with crappy, high-deductible healthcare, or to bank enough money to finish building a homey bed and breakfast – and fear of losing any of it that pushes the characters to act more and more deranged toward each other. It’s been a while since I’ve watched a series where so many episodes end on scenes that had me viscerally recoiling.
“Babe, everybody’s scamming,” a stoned Josh correctly declares in Episode 2. TThe only ones who can leverage a win are those who have hoarded enough wealth to boot up their private jet to fly off to their fifth house whenever the mood strikes — or if they account for at least 2% of an entire country’s GDP. And there’s no bigger apex predator in the Beef system than the club’s new owner, Chairwoman Park, played by the legendary Youn Yuh-jung as the quietly terrifying, richer-than-God head of a South Korean chaebol. She, too, is constantly making decisions that protect and enrich her and her conglomerate dynasty, down to her explaining why she chose her second husband in Dr. Kim (Song Kang-Ho), Korea’s “best plastic surgeon” who is 20 years her junior. Both Youn and Song have relatively little screen time in the grand scheme of the season, but not a single glance is wasted. They’re both highly calculated and effective actors, and Season 2 would be just good, but not outstanding, if their characters had been omitted. The second Song — playing the complete opposite of his role as a driver for the ultra-rich in Parasite — shows up (his first American TV role!), it adds extra gravitas that pushes Beef to the next dramatic level. And at a certain point, Season 2 sprints past Season 1 in an exciting tone shift that feels more spiritually similar to another prestige-y series that also starts with a B.
If the metaphor carrying Season 1 was interior rot, Season 2’s is infestation. Shots linger on ants parading across bowls of oranges and windowsills, and on hives of bees swarming in unwanted crevices. The swarming desire for more — incrementally growing from “all we need is healthcare” — and the insatiable thirst for revenge in warped thought patterns that remain unchecked become a constant creep that distorts our humanity. It turns all of those around you into things to exploit when it serves you most. By the time you catch yourself, it’s already too late. The seasons change and the cycle churns on.
via Beef Season 2 Review
by Leanne Butkovic
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