BEEF season two

Created, written and directed and by Lee Sung Jin, 2023–

Review by Nou Ra

Season one of BEEF follows two strangers caught up in a road rage incident and their entanglement that follows it. The second installment of the comedy drama series sees showrunner Lee Sung Jin change gears slightly, moving away from season one’s more obvious feud to a more existential look at human nature and its complexities.

The ‘beef’ here is socio-economic disparity, discussing the amoral behaviour of the rich, whilst examining the immoral lengths the poor will go to in an effort to rise up the social ladder. Make no mistake, everyone is awful, you won’t be rooting for anyone. There is no relief from the backstabbing, two-faced vanity and self-loathing of almost every character involved in this story. BEEF season two is darkly humorous, delving deep into the maelstrom of human behaviour.

Lee collaborates here with Hollywood heavy hitters Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, who have shared the screen before in the film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and their chemistry is palpable. Isaac plays Josh Martin, the hard schmoozing General Manager of the Monte Vista Point Country Club, while Mulligan plays Lindsay, his wife of many years, who works with him as an interior designer for the lounges and bars of the club. They are also working on a passion project to renovate their home as a B&B. Their lives feel toxically intertwined.

Pitted against them are Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton). Unaffectionately described by Josh and Linsday as ‘Gen Z’, they are a mid-honeymoon period, sickly sweet, engaged couple of the kind that say ‘I’ll miss you’ when the other one goes to the bathroom. Ashley works at the country club as a beverage girl, riding round the golf course in a buggy delivering drinks and snacks to the clientele. Austin is a part time physical trainer at the club’s in-house gym. Their lives also feel toxically intertwined. The interaction of these two couples is what gives us the beef. A lovers’ quarrel is caught on film and blackmail ensues.

Lindsay’s interior design of the country club is immediately hated by Chairwoman Park, the club’s new billionaire owner, and Josh’s job might be at stake if said billionaire isn’t pleased with every single detail of the club. The Chairwoman is played by South Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung (Woman of Fire, 1971), and Song Kang-ho (Parasite 2019, The Host, 2006) is her much younger husband Dr Kim. This couple shows what power means; in the social hierarchy, they are top of the food chain. They use and abuse their power in ways that the other couples cannot begin to understand or comprehend. Then there are the vacuous Stepford wife-types and their elderly husbands, who have paid $300,000 to join the club and who refer to their private jets as ‘PJs’.

Ashley suffers from a painful medical condition and once she has seen the doctor, she realises that she literally can’t afford to stay alive. The chasm between the wealthy club members and Ashley and Austin, who can’t afford health insurance, is highlighted in a comedic moment when they are trying to save some money and Ashley suggests unsubscribing from any apps they don’t need anymore, landing on the one app that is supposed to help them save money. The conversation about the American health system feels brief but complete, showing it as a comedy of errors and a horrifically crippling reality for millions of Americans.

BEEF season two has been widely likened to The White Lotus and, to a degree, I understand this, but it seems that the comparison comes from both series having luxurious settings in which people have obscene amounts of money. However, BEEF is in dialogue with its audience about which story we connect with most: the paycheck-to-paycheck poor couple, who celebrate a win by taking a pizza out of the freezer, to the middle class couple whose problems are disconnected from their financial viability, to the top 1% who can and will define their realities by their own rules due to the sheer quantity of their wealth.

At the end of season, there is a whisper of redemption for at least one character after a long list of dubious intentions and decisions. BEEF takes its brand to another level in season two, getting really messy and real petty in no time.