Beef Season 2 Bites Off More Than It Can Chew
A richer cut of meat doesn’t mean a better one.
Beef felt like a bolt of lightning when it premiered in 2023. A Netflix and A24 co-production created by Lee Sung Jin, it aimed its sharp, jagged social satire at the heart of the Asian diaspora, and produced a singular piece of television. It was smart, it was withering, and it had something deep and meaningful to say.
With its second season, Beef transforms into an anthology series and expands its horizons, to its detriment. And while a star-studded cast that includes Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, and Parasite star Song Kang-ho gives the series the patina of prestige, everything that made the first season of Beef feel like such a lightning in a bottle is lost in pursuit of creating a buzzier White Lotus. As a result, Beef Season 2 feels like an undercooked version of the “eat the rich” social satires that its first season so effortlessly transcended.
Much like the first season, the second season of Beef begins with a shockingly violent incident that kickstarts a petty feud between two parties. But instead of a man and a woman, Beef Season 2’s feud involves two couples: the upper-middle-class husband-and-wife Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) and the newly engaged, working-class couple Austin and Ashley (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny). Josh is the general manager of an elite southern California country club, while Lindsay is his long-suffering wife who has steadily grown to resent his simpering ways and mounting pile of debt. After a typical argument, a glitzy country-club fundraiser explodes into a full-blown brawl, Josh and Lindsay are caught in a compromising position by Austin and Ashley, who had arrived at their house to return Josh’s wallet.
One incriminating video and a bit of light blackmail later, and the two couples find themselves inextricably intertwined in their personal and professional lives — a toxic, codependent relationship that is exacerbated by the arrival of the country club’s new owner, ruthless Korean billionaire Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung).
Beef Season 2 has a more meandering and sprawling structure to it than the first season, which gave us the satisfying narrative of Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s Danny and Amy engaging in a series of escalating feats of vandalism against each other. When it comes to Josh and Lindsay and Austin and Ashley’s “beef,” it’s less about their feud than it is about their various trials as couples — Josh and Lindsay as a resentful, millennial couple, and Austin and Ashley as the mooning, slightly dimwitted Gen Z couple. Josh and Lindsay are buried in debt, haven’t had sex in years, and are unhappy with their current hum-drum lives, even cooped up in their beautiful mansion with their ridiculously pampered dachshund. Austin and Ashley are lowly employees at the country club, trying to make it work — Austin as a fitness influencer and trainer, and Ashley as a beverage cart operator without a high school diploma.
Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny play the Gen Z foils to Isaac and Mulligan.
The show makes a couple of half-hearted jabs at generational rifts (ChatGPT! Influencers! ), as well as your cursory class satire (look how many sweaters this dachshund wears!). But that’s just it, all of its satire feels frustratingly par-for-the-course, all of it having been done already in the most middling White Lotus seasons. Worse, this season’s high-profile stars all feel wildly underserved by the scripts, with Isaac and Mulligan forced to make do with one-note characters who are thinly sketched out caricatures at best. There’s no sense of their inner lives or what the two of them are so resentful they missed out on. Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny are slightly better served, though Spaeny’s Ashley also often feels like a collection of tropes about sad white girls with abandonment issues. Melton is probably the biggest standout of the series, carefully toeing the line between the Gen Z himbo satire and genuine socioeconomic angst (and showing that any time spent on Riverdale is truly a crash-course in making the most out of the most absurd writing). It’s probably no coincidence that Melton, as the only Asian-American actor in the lead cast, probably gets the most of creator Lee Sung Jin’s lingering class and social satire from Season 1, which so effectively captured the fraught nature of the Asian diaspora experience.
Beef Season 2 is not without its great moments, and indeed, it’s at its best when it leans into its salacious K-drama elements, with Youn’s Chairwoman Park and her husband Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho) bringing an element of conspiracy into the story that finally shocks the show out of its sluggish melodrama. And when the season (of which critics received all eight episodes) finally arrives at its bloody climax, there is an element of exciting satisfaction to it. But sadly, even the most titillating conspiracy can’t make the half-hearted social satire feel any sharper or more cogent. It’s a disappointing step down from the brilliance of Season 1, and a disappointingly undercooked effort from Lee.
