RIOTUS

When the first season of BEEF dropped, I wrote about Ali Wong’s Amy Lau and Steven Yeun’s Danny Cho, “The magnetism of this series is how accessible their descent is for us; the constipated passions, disillusionment, and faulty justifications allow them to hurl their rage at each other without daring to blow up their own lives (at least not at first). Yet detonating and rebuilding might be easier—if less fraught with schadenfreude for us. And you will be tempted to giggle while assuring yourself that you would handle things better; your revenge would be more strategic; you’d be smarter when it goes bad. Maybe.”

In preparation for Season 2, creator / showrunner / executive producer Lee Sung Jin shared a personal letter, writing, “…when we set out to turn BEEF into an anthology, the goal was never just to play it safe and replicate the first season. To help us do that, we were lucky enough to secure a cast that frankly still feels like a fever dream to me. Seeing Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan go toe-to-toe with Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton was a daily masterclass, along with the talented fresh faces in our ensemble like K-pop star BM, Mikaela Hoover, and Seoyeon Jang, along with the legendary William Fichtner. And then to add to all that, two of the greatest actors of all-time in Youn Yuh Jung and Song Kang Ho… It’s been the biggest honor of my career to see this cast bring so much humanity, humor, and horror to a season tackling the most intimate topic of all… love.”

With a cast like that, over 30 awards, and 8 Emmy wins, BEEF S2 had to come out swinging, and it needed to connect. As Lee points out, the move to an anthology series was smart. Feuding takes so many forms, and impotent rage can erupt in a variety of self-destructive ways. 

In the second season, the battle is between two couples—at first. The seemingly “rich” Josh and Lindsey (Isaac and Mulligan), who manage a country club, and the working-class Ashley and Austin (Spaeny and Melton), who work for them. One couple is in the middle of a marriage that has probably gone on too long, the other still has the idealistic glow of early love. What both couples have in common is ambition, debt, and they’re a bunch of self-centered idiots. Seriously, their idiocy is a major plot point. 

When the country club gets a new owner, another couple is thrown into the mix: The South Korean billionaires, Youn Yuh-jung’s Chairwoman Park and Song Kang-Ho’s Dr. Kim—two absolute legends. Together, this cast conspires to act their “asshole” characters into award-worthy turns, then they spiral into terribly bad behavior that makes us believe every contemptuous moment. Forgive me, but these six humans are trainwrecks. And that’s the point. 

That’s where the show circles back to its dissection of classism and how the reckless pursuit of money rots the brain. BEEF Season 2 is an arena, pitting poor, rich, and wealthy couples against each other to place bets on whether they’ll eat each other alive before they choke. As Lee says, it’s an intimate story about love—how it consumes, scapegoats, and no matter how heavy someone’s wallet might be, rotten still stinks. At its best, S2 is also about how these people desperately want to be somebody else. We see this in the clever visuals that flip the perspective when they imagine trading places with people they think outclass them. 

What did I think? If they all spontaneously combusted into hot ash, I’d call that justice. They’re just that vile. However, while the first season made the descent into the worst versions gleeful, this season didn’t. Possibly because the Wong and Yuen BEEF gave us a perspective we don’t often get: Asian rage and the smashing of monolithic stereotypes. This season contrasts American hustle mentality with South Korean power dynamics. However, the broader subject matter loses the original’s focus, and the disruption is lost, becoming more like prestige TV that we’ve seen before—the messy madness of incredibly petty, vindictive, and vain people with occasional moments of ah-ha. Less BEEF and more a White Lotus type of thing. So if you like that, you’ll probably be into this. I’m not. Not because those types of shows aren’t good, but because original BEEF tasted fresh.

What I’m trying to say is, BEEF S1 was meatier because it was singular. S2 is a crime drama that morphs into a thriller, with a class war that doubles as a war of the hearts as its bone of contention. I’m just not up in arms about it.