Critically huzzahed, festooned with Emmys, the 2023 first season of “Beef” told a story of road rage escalating to warfare and finally winding down to a sort of understanding. Though he mooted future seasons with its main characters, played by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, creator Lee Sung Jin has instead returned with an unconnected fresh story, premiering Thursday on Netflix. It offers a new cast of antagonistic protagonists, characters designed, as the title implies, for argument (and intermittent conciliation); alternating moods of tension and disappointment, with brief passages of relief.
As such, it’s the sort of show with which the viewer may find himself arguing, asking why these people just can’t act reasonably, and why am I watching. But because, as before, it’s (mostly) the characters one despairs of rather than the series itself — which is well wrought and very well acted and knows its business, whether you like it or not — the new “Beef” may be accounted on its own terms a success. (Still, that it runs eight episodes as opposed to the first season’s 10 is not a bad thing.)
The narrative centers on two couples, who war, often subtly, with themselves and one another — elder millennials Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) and the Gen Z Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) — though at times someone from one faction will find themselves sympathetic to or even allied with someone from the other. (Realignments are ongoing.) The action takes place around an exclusive Montecito country club — $300K initiation fee — where Josh is the much-liked general manager and Ashley a low-level employee in the “food and beverage” department whose mobility is hampered by her lack of a high school diploma. That there are ways to advance in the world other than education or even aptitude drives the series’ intertwined plotlines, here including blackmail, embezzlement and forgery.
As in Season 1, class divides the opposing parties, and while Josh and Lindsay live larger than Ashley and Austin, for whom a celebration dinner means a trip to California Pizza Kitchen, none of them are where they want to be; all have money problems. (The first two episodes are titled “All the Things We’re Never Going to Have” and “A New Starting Point for Further Desires,” to give you an idea of the trajectory.) Josh spent Lindsay’s inheritance on taking care of his mother. Ashley dreams of health insurance.
We begin at the end of a “Save the Frogs” fundraiser at the country club, presented by Josh and Lindsay, who helped put it on and who works there as a freelance interior decorator. But they begin arguing on the way home — Josh has forgotten her birthday and seems all too eager to jet off to Vegas with his rich bro, Troy (William Fichtner). We know there were good times for the couple — they have matching tattoos marking the date of an LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip concert at the Hollywood Bowl, on ecstasy. But now they are not having sex, which on TV is the worst thing imaginable. The herb garden remains unplanted, and Lindsay’s vague plans for a “bespoke” B&B are on permanent hold, as are Josh’s musical aspirations. She’s texting an old flame and he’s in a relationship with his laptop. For their part, Austin and Ashley declare their love for one another so often, one would say they doth declare too much.
Back home, Josh and Lindsay’s argument increases in intensity (things are brandished, things are broken), Ashley and Austin arrive on an errand to reunite Josh with a lost wallet; the noise of the fight brings them to a window through which Ashley videos the mayhem, because that’s what people do now. Leaving the scene, she and Austin discuss whether or not to tell the authorities. “Rich people are, like, so gross,” says Ashley. Austin, who has been to college (where he fears he might have peaked), brings up “late-stage capitalism”: “There’s got to be a redistribution of wealth,” he says, “and, like, we should all get out and vote.”
“What you’re really saying,” says Ashley, “is that we’ve got to take it back from everyone.”
The arrival of a Korean new owner, billionaire Chairwoman Park (the great Yuh-Jung Youn, from “Pachinko” and “Minari”), with her assistant Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), creates an atmosphere of uncertainty. It touches Josh — who worries about keeping his job, and begins some creative accounting to get what he feels he deserves, and what his marriage needs — and Ashley, who has wangled her way into a promotion, and Austin, whom she has finagled a job as a physical therapist, which he isn’t. In a related thread, flirty tennis pro Woosh (rapper BM) has a second line funneling women to the Seoul clinic of Park’s husband.
Along the way there are medical emergencies, a drug trip, a private jet to a private Hot Chip concert somewhere mountainous and snowy, some unpleasant business with a dog, heartfelt conversations and existential crises. Eyes rove, and rove back, and rove.
One does sometimes feel these people are being mocked by their creator, as well as by characters within the show, that we’re being asked to take them less than seriously — their aspirations, their abilities — in the way that Austin, who played football in school, keeps mentioning his Dick Butkus award, or Josh reminds Lindsay that “We get to be friends with politicians and CEOs — we had dinner with Bono,” at which she reminds him that they are not his friends; he is only an employee. Even Troy, who treats Josh well, will complain about soggy squash blossoms from the club kitchen.
But the actors keep it real enough, as their characters, forced to grow a little, are dragged into the same space for the climax, as the series revs up into a kind of conspiracy thriller, before a coda set eight years later finds them variously arranged. As in the less conclusive first season, it feels engineered to deliver the characters to happy, or relatively happy, endings, and to send viewers out not regretting their investment of time.
The post Feuding couples and class clashes fuel climactic Season 2 of ‘Beef’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
