It took me several episodes to get into the new Netflix series "Beef," starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two Southern California residents, who get into an escalating feud after a road rage incident. The show is very good - well acted, well written, great production, very entertaining, and plenty of substance - but it has the kind of anxiety-inducing story that I have trouble with. I can sit through a movie like "Uncut Gems" for two hours without much trouble. "Beef, " however, is ten hours of watching these two people teetering on the brink of self-destruction, and that's not my idea of a good time. Because of Wong's involvement, I assumed this would be more of a comedy than it turned out to be. There are some laughs, but mostly of the cringe and groan variety.
Part of the issue is that Danny (Cho) and Amy (Ali Wong) are pretty awful people from the outset, before we learn how terrible they actually are. Danny is a down-on-his-luck contractor, who owes too much money to a grifter cousin named Isaac (David Choe), and supports a shiftless younger brother named Paul (Young Mazino). Amy is a businesswoman with a young daughter, June (Remy Holt), and a stay-at-home artist husband, George (Joseph Lee). She's hoping to sell her business to the uber-rich Jordan (Maria Bello), so she can finally work less and spend more time at home. Despite being on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, Danny and Amy are both unhappy and full of rage. The feud gives them an outlet for these feelings, but at a significant cost.
The first three episodes of "Beef" nearly made me quit, because they were all about setting up why Danny and Amy were so angry, with only minimal time devoted to any actual feuding. I'm an Asian-American who grew up in So-Cal, and recognized a little too much of my own upbringing here. Amy sucking up to the suffocatingly crunchy art crowd and Danny's endless hustle for menial jobs immediately brought up uncomfortable memories that I wasn't keen on revisiting. "Beef," created by Lee Sung Jin, clearly contains biographical elements from his own experiences as an Asian-American immigrant, and I noticed a few details from Steven Yeun and Ali Wong's actual lives too. So, "Beef" feels like a very personal project for everyone involved. I'm glad I stuck with the show, because all the setup does pay off, the pace does pick up, and there are some good twists and turns to keep things interesting.
I wound up appreciating "Beef" more as a character study of two very troubled people than as a feud story. This is the first mostly dramatic role I've seen Ali Wong play, and she's excellent. We've seen plenty of stories about dissatisfied women blowing up their seemingly perfect lives, but the specificity here really won me over. Likewise, Steven Yeun has a lot of experience playing scumbags, but Danny is sympathetic in spite of his many faults. The quality of the performances goes a long way in helping to keep the story palatable as tensions escalate and the two leads take turns reaching new lows. "Beef" goes exactly where you think it will, with a crazy finale full of violence and mayhem, but all the buildup makes it feel earned. And I suspect the best episode is actually the one that takes place in the middle of the season, where everything is going fine for Amy and Danny. And it drives them both crazy.
I also want to spread some kudos to the supporting cast, many of them playing characters who aren't quite what they seem to be at first glance - Paul, George, George's mother Fumi (Patti Yasutake), and the nosy neighbor Naomi (Ashley Park). "Beef" does a good job of efficiently subverting expectations and peeling back everyone's layers to show us different sides of people we think we know. This is also true of Amy and Danny, who are innately more alike than they are different. One of the best messages in "Beef" is that Asian-Americans from different backgrounds share more common culture than they think. Amy is Chinese, Danny and Paul are Korean, and George and Fumi are Japanese, but in the end I doubt any viewer could distinguish which was which.
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