In transitioning from a standalone story to a multi-season anthology, all shows in the genre Ryan Murphy took mainstream with “American Horror Story” face the same existential question. If a series isn’t defined by a stable set of characters or locations, what does define it? For HBO’s “The White Lotus,” the answer is wealthy people trying and failing to outrun their problems at various outposts of a luxury hotel chain. For FX’s “Fargo,” it’s the battle between moral turpitude and folksy common decency across the American Midwest.
For Netflix’s “Beef,” the 2023 hit and Emmys darling that starred Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as enraged enemies, its core essence appears to be right there in the name. Wherever creator Lee Sung Jin took the concept next, a bitter rivalry would presumably be its driving force, just as Wong and Yeun’s searing anti-platonic chemistry powered Season 1 through some tonal bumps and big swings. And unlike “Feud,” the Murphy show with a confusingly similar name and concept, “Beef” could do so without the constricting tethers of a real-life inspiration.
Three years later, Season 2 seems to reintroduce itself along these established lines. The biggest difference, in line with all the attention and acclaim received by Season 1, is one of scale: rather than two individuals on a collision course across class and gender lines, we now have two couples. Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) are aging hipsters who’ve traded cool, creative careers in music and interior design for a cushy gig running a Montecito beach club — Josh as general manager, Lindsay as his de facto lieutenant. Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) are two low-level employees at the club who decide to blackmail the older couple into promotions when they catch the pair on video in a nasty, violent fight. The millennial-Gen Z generational divide, both sides fighting over scraps of a shrinking pie while still in smiling, obsequious service to aging boomers, is an enticing hook made more so by meta-casting. Isaac and Mulligan are experienced film stars, while Melton and Spaeny are more recent breakouts. All four are executive producers.
But over eight episodes, “Beef” loses focus and overcrowds this already expanded premise. By the closing credits, Season 2 is no longer mainly about the acrimony between its antiheroes and what it brings out from within them. Which begs the question: even if a follow-up allows Lee to attract bigger names and film in far-flung locations (more on that shortly), was “Beef” ultimately worth turning into a franchise?
Doubling the personalities would be a tall enough order in itself. Yet Season 2 soon reveals it’s not really the story of two couples, but three. The club has recently been acquired by a South Korean billionaire, Chairwoman Park (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-Jung of “Minari”), who’s less preoccupied with her new toy than the hand tremors threatening the livelihood of her much younger husband, plastic surgeon Dr. Kim (“Parasite” star Song Kang-ho, so rarely seen that the role is a glorified cameo). The new bosses’ high-class problems are always tertiary to the Josh-Lindsay-Ashley-Austin quadfecta and never stop feeling tacked-on, even when plot contrivances transport the entire ensemble to Seoul for the finale. But they’re just present enough to distract from the core conflict, transforming the season from a group character study into a corporate espionage thriller such that neither half feels fully fleshed-out.
It’s a shame, because before they peter out, there are threads worth following. Lee has a gift for crafting characters who ride the edge between loathsome and pathetic; you feel just enough for these people to keep watching, and enjoying, their self-inflicted suffering. Josh and Lindsay’s carefree youth has curdled into a tangle of resentments over squandered money and lost potential, with their dachshund Burberry — it’s a good joke! — the thin layer of glue keeping the sexless relationship together. Ashley and Austin are only 18 months into their courtship and newly engaged, but there are already cracks in their freshly laid foundation. A former college football player, Austin is struggling to reinvent himself as a personal trainer, while Ashley clings to the prospect of motherhood as a salve for her abandonment issues. (Her extortion of Josh is motivated by a need for health insurance to fund an ovarian cyst surgery.) Both seem more anxious about holding onto their first love than actually being enamoured with each other.
Just as Season 1 was a sociological cross-section of Asian-American Los Angeles and its many subcultures, Season 2 gets specific with another corner of Southern California. Josh and Lindsay live in Ojai, the hippie mountain town turned increasingly yuppie enclave; Austin and Ashley are in more working-class Oxnard. None of them can actually afford to live near their jobs around Santa Barbara, a common trend with service workers employed in what’s increasingly a retirement community for well-heeled baby boomers.
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But rather than dig into this dynamic, Season 2 represents the club’s clientele through a single VIP, Troy (William Fichtner), and his trophy wife Ava (Mikaela Hoover). Most of “Beef”’s satirical ire is instead reserved for those lower down the food chain: Josh’s unctuous sycophancy (Lindsay says he’s good at his job as an insult), Lindsay’s posh permafrost (she thinks Park deeming her aesthetic “colonial” is a compliment), and most uncomfortably, Austin and Ashley’s stupidity. (He thinks “misc.” on an invoice is a typo for “mist”; she makes sense of a 1 to 10 pain scale by reasoning it’s “like Letterboxd.”)
Given their youth and economic precarity, the show’s contempt for Austin and Ashley can tip into the mean-spirited, even if it’s not exclusive to them. Ashley complains that she worked “nine whole hours” at her new job, a “kids these days” stereotype that’s the most basic form of generational humor. Regardless, the performances are uniformly, and unsurprisingly, excellent. There are no great discoveries here, á la Young Mazino in Season 1 — just professionals demonstrating why their success is so justified. Melton, for example, follows up his revelatory turn in “May December” with another young man in a toxic relationship whose emotions are inscrutable to himself but painfully obvious to the viewer.
In fact, this expanded version of “Beef” has so many centres of gravity that the whole enterprise starts feeling adrift. At the season’s halfway mark, Ashley vows to “take” Josh “down” by any means necessary. The line gives the feeling of the plot locking into place. (Where’s the beef? Here!) Except little ever comes of it. “Beef” has to attend to the internal dynamics of the marriages, plus the initially vestigial but increasingly overpowering storyline about Park and Kim’s plastic surgery clinic. A finale set piece there is riveting and directed with flair by series stalwart Jake Schreier; the scene still feels disconnected from the preceding buildup. Dr. Kim and his physical decline are introduced at the end of Episode 2 in an abrupt escalation of stakes. Despite some gestures at Austin exploring his half-Korean heritage through a flirtation with Park’s assistant Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), the subplot is never smoothly incorporated.
Once the animosity between Josh, Ashley and their significant others fades into the background, it’s increasingly difficult to discern what Lee wanted to say with their juxtaposition. Is it that all couples outside the 0.01% will crack under financial pressure in time? Is it that the middle-aged envy and want to sabotage the innocence of fresh-faced twentysomethings? Or is it that Season 1 was successful enough to demand a sequel, regardless of how much Lee’s current interests aligned with the “Beef” framework? Season 1 of “Beef” was an original idea that took off on the strength of its own merits, not a brand name. Perhaps that was the magic worth attempting to replicate.
All eight episodes of ‘Beef’ Season 2 are now streaming on Netflix.
From Variety US