"Beef": Two Seasons of Half-Buried Rage and Woe That Speaks to Now

For a show runner whose scripted characters traffic in dialog that is prone to tipping into dark, philosophical soliloquies, Lee Sung Jin has a gift for staging onscreen comedic scrums that expand into madcap farce.

 You may come for the witty asides Lin happily drops in—he has called them the “chords” that people want to hear—and it’s such entertaining wisecrack fare he came of creative age with (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is the prime example).

What makes Lin special is that that hellzapoppin’ gear can fluidly shift down into near-despairing trauma that’s deeply personal to said characters. There's a subsumed rage at a caste system that melds ethnic prejudices with difficult upbringing.

 If Lin’s stories find his dramatis persona sometimes sobbing with anguish, they still have a chance, we steadily believe, at sobbing later with rediscovered affection and purpose. 

This has been evident through the televised 18 episodes of  “Beef”  in Seasons 1 and 2 as discoverable on Netflix, where he has a deal to bring more once he completes work co-writing an X-Men franchise that’s going into production. (Don’t be too quick to judge that he’s gone over to such IP; he’s a longtime legit fan boy who can’t resist one haywire member of his troupe in a major cluster-fuck sequence shout out, sans any supporting logic, “Wolverine cannot be circumcised!”) 

Lin’s creative mode, since the first season of “Beef” dropped in the Spring of 2023, is what the industry and  we the audience recognize as an `anthology’ series. (Some notable examples include “Black Mirror”,  “Fargo”  and “True Detective”.)  

To this viewer, it’s one of the best delivery systems for the kind of somber-hued, cinematic-but -on-a -small-screen programming that the movies now seem to make more rarely than ever. 

[Bonus terminology clarification]: An "anthology" is cousin to what are also called “Limited” series. In fact the Primetime Emmy Awards class them together for awards purposes. to be bundled as a shared category. series, which itself grew out of the old-school “mini-series” (e.g., “Band of Brothers” , which won the Primetime Emmy under that rubric in 2001. In winning, it helped set the tone for what you’ve perhaps noticed: such productions are among the best television we’ve seen across recent decades.]. 

The winner in that category for 2023’s offerings was “Beef” Season 1,  and its many wins reflected a big earlier helping of Golden Globes awards, It was an easy front runner, and capped its general dominance by winning the category as well as Best Actor, Actress, writer, director (Lin on those two) and more. 

From the promotional binge that preceded the first season’s release, it was clear the story’s events would be fueled by a central conflict; thirty-something Danny Cho, played by Steve Yuen, plays a contractor trying to ramp up his failing prospects.

 He’s about to exit a hardware store parking lot when he gets in a me-first confrontation with Ali Wong’s Amy Lau. Words re shouted, horns honked, a digit is flipped.  The mad chase that follows, with her swanky Mercedes outracing his battered pick-up, leaves him enraged but equipped with his license plate number,

Ten episodes later, with plenty of pain, wrath, scheming and sporadic violence, a resolution of sorts—actually of a very particular and promising sort—is reached.

Read on or defer, aware there may be a few light spoilers. 

Much like that season, derived from Lin’s own lived moment of road rage, Season 2 as it dropped this April was sparked by plot notions after he heard neighbors squabbling with disturbing ferocity.

 Whether to do anything about that, and just what to do if he did act, then spurred him to ask two different age groups—his own and the younger cohort he knew—and see if they held differing views.

Thus came a parade of story beats focusing on two couples. One is millennial—Oscar Isaac’s Josh and Carey Mulligan’s LIndsay—and a second couple is Gen Z, Charles Melton’s Austin and Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley. The scenes that spill out as we watch uneasily comprise a real actors’ bakeoff.  The older couple’s marriage is fracturing under money pressures and time served, with Isaac’s hyperarticulate eyebrows and Doberman-like fake grins drawing only a vivisecting stare from Mulligan’s who-farted mien and body language. (Lindsay, who’s feeling her age, gets the season’s mic drop when the conniving if studly club tennis pro offers to sign on for the “40-and-over”. She slops him with her drink and adds, fleeing, “I’m 39, you fuckwit!”)  

The ensemble work is at tines almost too exuberant as the elder couple with their collapsing future maneuver for some advantage against the younger tag-team, ickily watchable for Melton’s school-of-Brando dimness and Spaeny’s flinching phoniness.

That the schemes that pop up are executed in a posh Montecito country club (with William Fichtner as Troy, the lupine emblem of overprivileged, cocksure oligarchy) means that the interactions summon up echoes of “White Lotus.  Still, Lin and right-hand man Jake Schreier roll out their own breed of wealth signifiers, with class and ethnicity drawing out the principals’ casually sociopathic personality flaws.

What gives Lin’s work more heft that that of Mike White is that the settings and threats are less louche, more consequential. (Cf. “Margo Has Money Troubles”.)  The quartet is foregrounded partly to set off plot developments requiring a passel of amusingly hapless would-be gangsters, some Korean (and who knew such a suburban Cali county could foster such a group?). This squad is who are more profane and dangerous than the oppressed working class of White’s scenarios, but when the billionaire Seoul-based -conglomerate queen and country club owner streps in, there may be blood.

Where critiques of empty family relations and the sting of arrant materialism lick at the edges of White’s scenarios, both seasons of “Beef” reflect certain ground truths of America’s K-shaped economy today. Austin still cherishes his college football glory (he won the Butkus trophy! Knowing, evocative name drop, Mr. Lin!) and with great self-assurance, issues his sophomoric takes. (I always thought `libtard’ was an empty MAGA coinage until I watched Melton demonstrate it.) Pains are taken to show the casual cruelties of  the elders, of high net worth and otherwise,   whose parenting failures created these greedy wretches.

It will be interesting, less for the significance of the trophies than as a gauging of the national rich-people-suck mood, to see how Season 2 fares in the awards arena when the Emmy noms come out on July 8.   Season 2, which offers eight episodes to the first season’s ten (though they also run longer), perhaps is not the prohibitive favorite its predecessor was. 

One wonders if the bleakness represented by feasible contenders like “DTF St. Louis”, “Half Man”, Lord of the Flies” and even the J.F.K. Jr./ Carolyn Bessette diss-fest “Love Story” will disappear in a shared fog bank of anomie and anhedonia, and that Season 2 of “Beef”, with its moments of grace and resolution, will win in a long run on the muddy track that is our national mood.

Those potential competitors each have their real-life resonances –the intrusion of the internet into a thirst-trapped sexual desperation in “DTF St. Louis”, an even more confused grasping for identifying “Half Man:, the demonic apocalypse of human nature in actual nature in “Lord of the Flies”, the ruinations of a life lived in public in “Love Story”.   It’s worth cataloguing those if only to set them against “Beef”, which,  as the show’s critical stature indicates, has now notched two seasons unveiling Lin’s abiding focus on deep concerns that have to be called spiritual.

Lin, though proudly Korean if ambivalent about what it means for him and his cohort  be Korean-American, has used art direction and elaborate settings to fix his deep and fertile visual sense on Asian concerns of karma and reincarnation—collectively, samara, the cycle of life and pain.  

You could even say he stands among us, less and less a stranger, as an example for assimilation and reconciliation that a hate-ridden administration would reject (save for the billionaires, of course).

He’s spoken about making an attempt on his own life when he was 32, both in some  detail to the New Yorker and while spotlighted collecting a trophy in the Emmy sweep: “A lot of suicidal ideation on this show was based on stuff that I and the folks up here have struggled with over the years. I’m grateful and humbled by everyone who watched the show and reached out about their own personal struggles. That’s very life-affirming, so thank you.”

In Season 1, as expertly portrayed by Yuen, Danny Cho is in his 30s and suffering with  mood disorders, as was Lin at a similar stage in life. Having survived, thrived, and even triumphed, Lin seems as much an approachable Everyman as a recently enthroned king of streaming content could be. He dishes out credit to his team—notably colleague Schreier his fellow writers, and entire gaggle of creative right-hands—but seems to question his own ascension when he drops quotes about life’s inevitable course with lines like, “You end up becoming the thing that you never thought you would be.”

 In his ongoing search to perhaps discover what Danny Cho  at one point says-“Why can’t we be happy?”  he demonstrates his knack  has a knack for aphorism. And although not all of his sidelong episode headings fully land as insights into his themes, others amplify his messages.

One is from the first of all 18 episodes:  “All the Things We're Never Going to Have"

Ultimately, late in the entire run of events, the billionaire matriarch of Season 2 has lured or kidnapped the now full-on-lunatic troupe all the way to Seoul for the banger of a concluding episode.  It draws its title almost as a call back the way we’ve heard her compare civilization’s remorseless class system to the laws of nature. It’s a forlorn if unapologetic message that emerges as a farewell and a warning:   "It Will Stay This Way and You Will Obey"