TV Review – Beef

Beef (Netflix)
Written by Lee Sung Jin, Alice Ju, Carrie Kemper, Alex Russell, Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen & Niko Gutierrez-Kovner, Joanna Calo, Kevin Rosen, Jean Kyoung Frazier
Directed by Hikari, Jake Schreier, and Lee Sung Jin

Even though we’re attempting to make a permanent life in the Netherlands, I still keep tabs on what is happening back in the States. There are people I love back there, so it’s important to know if violence escalates, the food supply chain is deteriorating, etc. One thing I’ve noted in the last year is a rapid increase in random violent acts, especially on the roadways. Driving in America has always been a particularly hazardous venture, but it appears things have gotten worse? In states where open carry laws have been relaxed, you can’t go a day without hearing about multiple road rage incidents that end in gunfire. The series Beef presented itself in its trailers and marketing as a show about how one of these conflicts escalates wildly out of control, and that was a pretty intriguing premise.

Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) is a struggling contractor who wants to help his parents recover after they lost their motel business. Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is a successful businesswoman with a Pottery Barn-type venture called Koyohaus. The two cross paths in an L.A. shopping center parking lot one day: Danny is pulling out, Amy stops and passes through, and they almost collide. One person shouts at the other, horns honked, and a middle finger flashes. Danny pursues Amy; they almost crash into each other before Amy peels away. Danny can’t let it go, which leads to him tracking Amy down via her license plate number. His retaliation causes Amy to hunt him down. By the end, the people they love the most in their respective lives have been pulled into this unceasing whirlpool of hate & revenge. 

My experience with Beef felt like a roller coaster. I should note I do not enjoy roller coasters. My apprehension going into the series was that I feared the show would get too scared to really reflect the state of America back to its audience and proceed to soften the blows of the whole scenario that gets the story going. I don’t think Beef was a complete failure, but I was very unsatisfied with the ending and portions of the series. There are some fantastic episodes in here, especially around the halfway mark, that got me excited. We get moments where the characters appear to be headed into the dark territory I hoped they would, but then the showrunner and/or Netflix tapped those brakes and kept us from going there.

One of the things a premise like this needs to decide early on in the story is just how dark this is going to be. Once you know where things will end, you can appropriately pace the descent. Beef throws a lot of twists at us along the way, twists that can radically shift the show’s tone and often in dramatically different directions. This is some tightrope-walking writing that doesn’t work and leaves the audience needing clarification as to whether the show is taking its initial idea seriously anymore. It doesn’t help that we have a sprawling cast of supporting characters who never get enough of a spotlight for us to care all that much about them. There are glimmers, though.

Patti Yasutake plays Amy’s mother-in-law, the Bohemian Japanese-American artist Fumi. A few episodes into the series, we look into Fumi’s life and find she is in tremendous debt. This crushing demand for money leads her to act out of desperation. It’s one of the better dramatic moments in the series, a cliffhanger that hooks us into going into the next episode. But Fumi doesn’t get much development beyond this. She quickly becomes an inconsequential supporting character while the two leads return to the plot. This happens to every supporting character in the series; there’s a moment when they appear to become a more significant part of the plot and then recede. 

Beef’s biggest problem is that it becomes a plot escalation machine without meaningful character work. Everything that happens only serves to advance the plot. But because we don’t know the affected parties well, it’s hard to deeply care about what happens to them. Example: Amy decides to catfish Danny through his company’s Instagram account. But it turns out that his younger brother runs the account, and she ends up flirting with him. They meet, and she has to reveal it was her, not the younger employee whose pictures she used. The brother actually thinks Amy is cuter. They escalate into a full-blown sexual affair. This fizzles out but is later used as a plot point to drive a wedge between Amy and her husband. But when I got to the end of the series, I looked back and wondered why any of that mattered at all. How did it help in investing me in the fate of these characters? It really didn’t. 

We often see whinging on the internet about movies and tv shows “not making sense” or being “full of plot holes.” You cannot levy this complaint against Beef. Every single thing anyone does is part of the plot momentum machine. In this way, Beef is a perfect binge-watching product. Each episode will make callbacks to previous episodes and reward viewers for paying attention to the plot. But the closer you look, the more ludicrous many of these plot points become all in service of just escalating but not letting the story explore the dark psyche of America. One of Amy’s most fervent antagonists ends up engaged to the CEO, whom Amy is counting on buying up her company and making her rich. There’s never a hint before the moment we find out that they are engaged that would imply it was a possibility. But then it happens because the script needs to escalate things. 

Danny goes through a twisty series of events in the first half, which cause him to become an active member of an Asian-American church. He starts working as a handyman around the church, and tension builds between him and the husband of his ex-girlfriend, who all attend. Then that just goes away at a certain point, and we never return to it. Becoming part of the church does help escalate the tension between Danny and his career criminal cousin, Isaac (David Choe) but nothing more than that. So much about the church is set up and tossed aside because the plot needs to focus on something else. 

Around two-thirds into the series, we’re suddenly thrown some magical realist elements which feel entirely out of nowhere. Of course, they facilitate the plot, not adding anything to our understanding of the characters beyond the surface level. This was when Ariana struck on what the show was trying to be but failing at. Beef wants to be Atlanta. You can see it in the aesthetics & the focus on a non-white demographic and the complexity within that group. However, Atlanta set the table early on as a weird show less interested in plot momentum than rich character development. My biggest praise of Atlanta is how much I loved those characters when the series ended because the show would create room to breathe and let them develop. Beef does not have this. I could also see shades of Barry and The White Lotus, but Beef doesn’t come close to matching any of these things.

Early on in this series, you might feel like it’s building to something big, but then it starts to falter and redeems itself a little, only to stumble again and deliver one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve seen in a long time. The show’s final message seems to be, “Hey, everybody hurts.” It says this in the most clunky, pandering manner I could imagine, which is even worse because I never really saw a reason to care about these people. There were so many supporting characters I was far more interested in the fates of than the two central characters by the end. All of them are tossed aside. 

Beef as a two-hour feature film would have worked much better than spinning wheels for most of the 10 episodes. In a movie, I don’t expect to see supporting characters get much development, and the focus would have been tighter. It would still be bad if the same ending was in a film version. It felt like a retread of Paul Haggis’ Crash, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen from a writing perspective. I also didn’t find Ali Wong as scary as I thought she needed to be. Amy is supposed to be a figure that frightens us, and she didn’t deliver. I wondered how someone like Constance Wu could have made Amy someone genuinely intimidating. Steven Yeun is far better at creating a spectrum of emotions with Danny, allowing him to be vulnerable yet villainous at times. Mismatched casting with the two leads, in my opinion. 

Beef is getting a lot of love from critics and some of the audience. The showrunner said he has outlined three seasons, which shocked me because that last episode feels like the end. I have no interest in following these characters any further. Any additional seasons will likely be another plot machine that promises to escalate things before deflating the story and leaving us with a flat, unsatisfied feeling.