This Beef season 2 review is Spoiler-Free.
The anthology drama is a popular trend in prestige TV these days. Shows ranging from The White Lotus to True Detective have all racked up awards hardware, A-list casting coups, and buckets of critical acclaim by completely reinventing themselves from year to year and keeping little but the series’ title the same. Whether this shift is a good idea or not is an open question, particularly since many of these shows never quite regain the narrative heights of their superior first seasons in subsequent outings (Cruel Summer, The Terror, the aforementioned True Detective). But the impulse behind them is understandable. The entertainment industry loves an established property, after all.
The first season of Netflix’s Beef premiered to widespread acclaim, registering a 98% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes before going on to nab eight Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology series and acting wins for stars Steven Yuen and Ali Wong. Its concept, a dysfunctional feud between two strangers whose lives grow increasingly adversarial after a road rage incident, doesn’t immediately seem to lend itself to an anthology format. But after that kind of success, it’s not a surprise that Netflix and creator Lee Sung Jin wanted to keep the show alive. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that Beef season 2 is a compelling, propulsive endeavor, staying true to many of the franchise’s larger themes — unexpressed anger, class disparity, and existential unhappiness — even as it recasts them in a very different setting and tone.
From its opening moments, Beef season 2 is a very different viewing experience than its predecessor, both narratively and tonally speaking. A meditation on love and marriage told through a cross-section of couples at various stages in their lives and relationships, it’s one part generational clash, one part domestic drama, and one part sly send-up of capitalistic excess. Set at a posh Southern California country club that caters to the wealthy, elite, and frequently shallow, the story initially follows two couples: Gen Z-ers Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a pair of newly engaged low-level club employees, and Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) Martin, married elder millennials wrestling with the reality that their lives haven’t exactly turned out the way they once hoped.
Their lives become intertwined after Austin and Ashley witness the Martins having a potentially violent argument, and use their recording of the event to force Josh to use his position as the General Manager at Monte Vista Point Country Club to help them get ahead in their careers. As the beef between the two couples escalates, the show delves into the ways that even the best and most well-intentioned relationships can evolve into something quite different and more complicated than they started out as. Things become even messier when both pairs are pulled into the orbit of the wealthy Korean couple taking over the country club, the billionaire Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and her second husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), a famous plastic surgeon.
As they all vie for her approval — and for the job security that comes with it — each is forced to make darker personal choices and painful relationship compromises along the way. Much like season 1, things escalate steadily over the course of the season’s eight episodes, in ways that threaten the settled lives and livelihoods of all the couples at the story’s center in increasingly over-the-top (and occasionally borderline unbelievable) ways.
Unlike the franchise’s first season, in which the titular beef between Danny and Amy is aggressive and overt, the various beefs that unfurl in season 2 are much more passive-aggressive and internal. Part of that is because Austin, Ashley, Josh, and Lindsay all have to work in the same community to some degree, so there’s a much higher degree of performative niceness required from all of them, much of which is played for laughs. It’s also because the beef between these two couples isn’t the only conflict at work in these episodes; each pair is also wrestling with its own set of demons within their relationships, as well as the internalized anger that often goes hand in hand with the realization that your life is going to contain a lot more settling and compromise than you initially expected it to.
But while this season has plenty of buzzy moments and more than a few surprises, the real reason to indulge in this second helping of Beef is its cast, which is absolutely stacked from top to bottom with outstanding performers. Isaac and Mulligan are dynamite together, deftly conveying the complicated layers of a marriage that’s been through years of ups, downs, and everything in between — and have the grudges and lingering resentments to show for it. Melton and Spaeny channel the most irritatingly stereotypical traits of Gen Z, even as their youthful chemistry and determined optimism remind us how naive and inexperienced they both are.
Oscar winner Youn doesn’t get nearly enough to do — a sidequest to Korea is one of the season’s weakest elements — but she makes the few introspective moments her character gets count. And some of the series’s funniest moments come courtesy of William Fichtner as megarich club member Troy, whose marriage with trophy wife Ava (might actually be the series’s most honest. (If only because it’s clear his real true love is his private jet.)
While Beef season 2 doesn’t quite reach the narrative heights of the franchise’s first season, its sharp social satire and incisive relationship arcs make it a perfect binge, and the kind of drama that’s very hard to look away from. Though it’s a story of a very different kind of beef, in the end, the franchise’s second helping is ultimately still satisfying.
All eight episodes of Beef season 2 are available to stream on Netflix now.
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