Beef Review: Two Enthusiastic Middle Fingers Up

Emotionally devastating, intense, and often riotously hilarious, Beef is a series so special that it falls in the top one percent of all media ever crafted for television or streaming. A show so intricately constructed in terms of character and pacing that it can often trick the viewer into thinking they’re watching the anarchic dissolution of civilization as we know it in real time, Beef taps into the primal side of human nature with equal parts empathy and contempt. By pushing the boundaries of the medium and never doubting the intelligence of the audience, series creator Lee Sung Jin has created more than a masterpiece. It’s a fucking masterpiece.

Beef starts off with an inciting incident plenty of people are familiar with, as struggling handyman and contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) is cut off in the parking lot of a home improvement superstore while he’s trying to back out of his spot. The driver that boxed him in and nearly got hit flips Danny off and takes off in their immaculate looking, snow white SUV. Incensed and already stressed out for other reason, Danny peels out of the parking lot in his older model pick-up truck and proceeds to chase down the object of his ire. After a bit of cat and mouse, things end with nothing more than a flower garden getting trampled by some tires, but Danny can’t let things go mentally, bragging to everyone around him about how he got the better of some guy who tried to mess with him.

But it wasn’t a guy that cut Danny off. It was Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a well-to-do businesswoman and mother on the rise with stresses of her own. Amy has been waiting weeks and months to sell her profitable plant company to the billionaire owner of a retail chain (Maria Bello). The longer things drag out, the more Amy starts to feel trapped and hopeless. Things at home with her relentlessly positive, mindfulness espousing artist husband (Joseph Lee) and doting, highly critical mother-in-law (Patti Yasutake) only compound matters. When Danny – whose own business is tanking and is becoming increasingly desperate – decides to track down Amy to tell her off, it kicks off a petty, but increasingly dangerous feud between the have and the have-not that could only end in mutually assured destruction.

Early into Beef, after security camera footage of their initial altercation has gone viral on social media, a character close to Amy exclaims, “I just can’t understand what these people are so angry about!” With Beef, series creator Lee Sung Jin attempts to answer that question, one that’s at the heart of our current obsession with outrage. When people see secondhand anger in their own lives, they ask what the problem could be to make things escalate to such a degree and pass judgment, but they never try to get into the headspace of the angry parties. Jin and his impeccably assembled cast, on the other hand, are willing to get uncomfortably close to the fire and explore every bit of the flame in microscopic detail. The beef between Danny and Amy is only the tip of the flame, the part that actually burns coldest, but brightest. The white hot core of the flame and the fuel that sustains it can be found in their individual circumstances and the duties they feel towards the people around them.

Danny is desperately trying to stay afloat, so he can enact his grand plan of bringing his parents over from Korea. It’s kind of a make-good measure to alleviate some of the guilt he feels over running the family’s motel business into the ground. He wants to buy land and build them a house, but Danny is in so much debt that he can barely afford rent on the apartment he shares with his younger, more immature brother, Paul (Young Mazino). Just as Danny is willing to go to great lengths to get back at Amy, he’s also willing to go into business with his shady, recently released from prison cousin, David (Isaac Cho) and essentially hijacking all of Paul’s crypto investments for his own potential gain. Danny isn’t a nice person at his core, but the struggles he faces are instantly relatable, and it’s obvious that his struggles have made him desperate.

Aside from her obvious anger issues, Amy is slightly more likeable, but her level of extreme privilege makes her harder to identify with. Although Amy has created her own success from the ground up, everyone keeps trying to tell her what to do and how to react, low-key being told that her feelings aren’t valid in the grand scheme of things. Her husband is supportive to an extent, but most of his well meaning advances come across as condescending, and he’s unable to meet Amy halfway on issues regarding their financial future and what’s best for their daughter, June (Remy Holt). In her professional life, Amy is constantly forced to kiss the rings and asses of people who don’t see a successful entrepreneur, but rather as someone trying to move into the higher tax bracket they want to keep others out of. In reality, she wants out of her business so she can spend more time with her kid, and the money seems to be a bigger concern to everyone else but her. Amy is a nicer person to an extent, and her frustrations are certainly understandable, but just like Danny, she’s her own worst enemy.

In Beef, two diametrically opposed forces with deeply felt personal aspirations traumatize each other; their loops of unhappiness forever linked together by a honk. As their personal struggles become more complicated, the beef becomes a point of release because Danny and Amy see this as a war they might actually be able to win; a way to assert their dominance not over each other, but subconsciously against everything that holds them back. Although their back and forth only puts each of them ahead for a brief moment or two, it’s the sheer rush of releasing their anger on each other that gives them release from lives they feel like they can’t control. Movies and series have already been made about people who go to war with one another sheerly based on personal principles, but Beef refreshingly and smartly looks at how anger and revenge can fill a larger void in someone’s life.

If Beef were merely a juvenile comedy about people revenge pranking one another in a series of escalating stunts, it wouldn’t be able to sustain a ten episode arc. What Jin has crafted here is a briskly moving, exceptionally stylish, and perversely compelling deep dive into the parts of ourselves that we repress and refuse to acknowledge. The overlapping character traits, influence of outside forces, and sense of escalation in Beef is positively Shakespearian in scope; its ambition carefully embedded into the fabric of an easily accessible modern parable that will hook viewers from the second it starts. And make no mistake: Beef is a series that practically demands to be binged (which is easier when every episode is just a shade over half an hour in length). The only way to truly experience the momentum and narrative force of Beef is to be locked in with it all the way through. It’s roughly five-and-a-half hours of pure cinema in the format of a limited series.

Beef also leans into its Asian-American identity exceptionally well. Both Danny and Amy are family driven people whose loyalties are constantly being tested. They don’t want to break with traditions. They want to honour them in their own ways. Danny has a fascinating relationship to his family’s Christian faith, while Amy seems like someone who would embrace Eastern philosophies more if everyone around her wasn’t constantly telling her that she’s doing everything wrong. Both have rocky relationships with parental figures, and are subtly looked down upon by those who raised them, leading to feelings of guilt and shame that further influence their world view. The cultural perspective of Beef – which includes Korean, Japanese, and Chinese influences – only serves to further enrich an already thematically stacked series.

It also goes without saying that Beef has a lot to say about modern society on a political level, but Jin’s examination of our current divide is a lot smarter and subtler than one would expect for a show driven by pure emotion. With an eye cast keenly towards the past, Beef looks at the ways generational traumas can erode well being without people even realizing that it’s happening. (Or, if they have some self-awareness to them, they just repress it.) Similarly, Beef comes with a fair number of references to the Bush Jr. and Obama administrations, offering some sly commentary on how we all ended up in this mess. It also feels like no small coincidence that Danny and Amy both listen almost exclusively to 90s era alternative rock and pop hits from their youth, and that the entire soundtrack is built around tracks from a time many see to be the last truly “frivolous” era in North American culture. (Between Beef and the second season of Yellowjackets, it’s looking to be a heck of a year for Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl,” which is due it’s own “Running Up That Hill” styled reappraisal.)

The cast also brings everything they have and then some to Jin’s vision. It’s little surprise that Yeun’s turn as the sometimes unlikeable everyman is layered and note perfect, and he pretty much solidifies his status as a perpetually underrated talent who should be winning more awards than he already has. As for Wong, her performance in Beef is absolutely revelatory and triumphant, going well beyond the comedic persona she often employs (and certainly does get to use for a lot of this) and digging incredibly deep into her dramatic toolbox the longer the series goes on. The chemistry between Yeun and Wong is so outstanding that their brief moments on screen together carry the majority of the series when they’re apart. They can build a curious amount of sympathy while also making the viewer absolutely despise their personal decisions and outlooks. The supporting cast also offers up highly memorable work from Lee, Mazino, Yasutake, Cho (who balances comedy and menace brilliantly), a particularly contemptible Bello, Ashley Park (as one of Amy’s nosy neighbours and Bello’s closest confidants), and Justin H. Min (as a member of Danny’s church with whom a different unspoken beef starts to arise). It’s a show with no bad parts, and everyone embraces what they’ve been given by Jin to the absolute fullest.

Around the seventh episode or so, the side characters in Amy and Danny’s lives start to integrate themselves on the storyline, changing their rivalry in unexpected ways. As a series, Beef is full of blindsiding twists, shifting allegiances, and a surprising amount of heart buried within its gruff, tough talking exterior. It’s a show that grows more pleasingly complex and thoughtful, even as Amy and Danny’s lives are spinning further and further out of control, building to cathartic releases that are satisfying, devastating, and often impossible to predict, culminating in a grand finale that’s one of the most daring artistic and narrative flexes in the history of the long-form medium. Beef is an open nerve being shocked by a live wire, but instead of being painful, it’s absolutely eye opening. Hands down, Beef is one of the best things Netflix has ever put out and a shoe in for one of the best series of the year.

Beef is available to stream on Netflix starting Thursday, April 6, 2023.