The first season of Beef brought together two people from very different circumstances and put them on a collision course with each other. The second season from creator Lee Sung Jin tackles conflict from a different perspective, with two couples at the center of this season’s proverbial beef, layers of fiction present as the relationships evolve and mutate, orbiting each other in a game of obsession.
Josh (Oscar Isaac) is the general manager of Monte Vista Point Country Club while his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) spends most of her time redecorating it. The long-married couple have dreams of converting their woodsy home into a bed and breakfast/live music venue, a plan they breathlessly discuss while high on Molly, but those naturally crumble when they’re forced to face sober reality. There’s a tension in their relationship that they can’t quite shake.
Maybe it’s due to Josh’s problematic relationship with sex or Lindsay’s resentment towards him for his position, even if it provides her with an extremely comfortable life. This tension comes to a head early on, culminating in a knockdown-drag-out fight where both Josh and Lindsay exchange blows and are caught in a compromising position by a younger couple.
Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) don’t really seem to know how the world works, but they’re so obsessed with each other that it doesn’t matter. Austin, a personal trainer, regurgitates fitness tips he learns on YouTube to his clients while Ashley trolls the green at the club, hawking White Claws to golfers who have paid the $300,000 member initiation fee.
Like Josh and Lindsay, Ashley and Austin also have dreams. Theirs are a bit smaller — one is obtaining health insurance, for starters — but they are dreams nonetheless. Ashley, eventually, sees Josh and Lindsay’s fight as a way to achieve those dreams, or at least start building towards them. It doesn’t matter if Ashley and Austin are not the brightest (one particular laugh-out-loud moment sees Ashley misunderstand what a deductible is). Their dreams still matter.
This is at the heart of Beef season 2. Who society validates by clearing a path, how a hyper-capitalist world compromises our morals, and why, at the end of it all, we’re just like ants, marching in a line together towards the promise of something better, with no way to know whether we’ll ever reach it.
Beef Season 2 Is A Comedy Of Errors
Lee maintains Beef‘s acidic sense of humor in its sophomore season, poking fun at both couples to great effect. At first, it seems as if the show is only making fun of Austin and Ashley, who seem more overt in their naivety. But just because Josh and Lindsay are jaded doesn’t mean they aren’t naive. Both couples navigate situations as if they are the smartest people in the room, but they are proven wrong about that time and time again.
When a new owner takes over Monte Vista Point, Josh and Lindsay are quickly forced to reevaluate their positions in the social strata of the club. Youn Yuh-jung stars as Chairwoman Park, the club’s billionaire benefactor, who ensnares Josh in her own schemes involving her slippery-fingered surgeon husband Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), still back in Korea as Park assesses her new investment. The three couples are inevitably intertwined, especially as Ashley takes advantage of Austin’s half Korean heritage to find an in with the Chairwoman and her assistant Eunice (Seoyeon Jang).
It’s a lot of story and this sprawling narrative doesn’t always work in Beef‘s favor. There’s a lack of cohesion that stands in stark contrast to the tighter storytelling of its predecessor. This kind of sweeping tale, though, gives Beef a different feel this time around. Whereas the Ali Wong and Steven Yeun chapter focused on the complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships on an intimate level, season 2 feels more like a Grand American Story, a parable about the destructive force of capitalism and how striving for something that seems better may just leave you worse off.
A quiet anxiety hums just below the surface, a lingering sense that something bad could happen at any moment…
There are touches of themes from the first season — how race factors into the predominantly white world of country clubs, how anger and resentment breeds irrationality, and how easy it is to be lonely at a time when we’re all so connected. A quiet anxiety hums just below the surface, a lingering sense that something bad could happen at any moment, the specter of emotional and physical violence just around every corner.
When the show is reaching for the heights of its first season, there’s a tension there, the series unfurling into something a little messier. As a conspiracy grows and envelops all of our main characters, Beef season 2 can feel unwieldy, but Lee and his co-directors Jake Schreier and Kitao Sakurai maintain a sleek visual style that evolves as the series progresses.
The performances of the cast evolve, too. Melton and Spaeny have more to give than they first appear — the airheaded Ashley and Austin may seem like they don’t have chemistry or common sense, but the pair of actors peel back the layers of the couple, revealing them to be just as shifty as Josh and Lindsay. There’s a cyclical theme to Beef season 2 in this way; the world can be an endless feedback loop of exploitation and opportunity, the self adapting to which is relevant at any given moment.
The emotional shifts mirror those of the tone and, though it sometimes seems like a bug rather than a feature this time around, Beef season 2 still maintains the electric unpredictability that is becoming a hallmark of the show. Blood or tears could spill, a quiet moment of affection could curdle into self-doubt and distrust, and someone can turn into the worst version of themselves at any given moment.
All episodes of Beef season 2 are now streaming on Netflix.
- Release Date
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April 6, 2023
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Lee Sung Jin
- Directors
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Hikari, Jake Schreier, Kitao Sakurai, Lee Sung Jin
- Writers
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Alice Ju
