So, Netflix's "Beef" is going the anthology route. The newest eight-episode season tells an original story about more desperate people in conflict, with no connections to the first season. Showrunner Lee Sung Jin continues to explore themes of the Asian-American diaspora and misplaced rage, this time through a story about three couples in three different socioeconomic categories.
The Monte Vista Point Country Club is managed by Josh (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan). They have money troubles and their marriage is on the rocks, despite their lavish lifestyle and the lofty company they keep. One of the employees of the club, Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), and her fiancée Austin (Charles Melton), catch Josh and Lindsay in the middle of a violent fight one night, and manage to film it. This gives them the leverage to potentially escape their own stalled lives in low-income purgatory. However, there's another wrinkle. The club has a new Korean owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), a very rich and influential businesswoman who has a habit of playing favorites. Her husband, plastic surgeon Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), is in the middle of a potential scandal, and Chairman Park is eyeing the club as a potential way out.
Like the first season of the show, all the main characters are people who do terrible things. Some are driven by money or ambition. Some act badly due to being in relationships that enable their worst behavior. Some are bad because their circumstances or upbringing seems to give them no other choice. Nearly everyone turns out to be redeemable, but hardly any of them choose redemption in the end. The show follows all the players as couples and as individuals, having some episodes focus only on one or two characters at a time. A noticeable difference from the first season is that there isn't a simple inciting incident that pits two or more characters directly against each other. The character dynamics are much more complicated, and the intra-couple hostilities are just as important as the ones between the different couples, especially when the lines start to get blurry.
The high level of acting talent involved means that there are all kinds of subtleties and shadings to the characters that are exposed as the show examines them from different angles. This is very much a black comedy, so while there's some tugging at the heartstrings, the characters have a tendency to turn on a dime. You might be rooting for someone in one episode, and rooting against them in the next. For instance, Ashley starts out as the most vulnerable character with the least amount of power, and seems perfectly nice and sweet. It's understandable that she decides to try the blackmail scheme when she discovers a medical issue and needs health insurance fast. However, behavior that just seemed quirky and innocent when she was at the bottom of the ladder becomes more and more distasteful as she moves higher up, and starts getting used to wielding her privilege. We see her at her best and her worst. In one episode she's utterly sympathetic as the hapless victim of systemic forces arrayed against her. In another, she's a nightmare of a selfish, social-climbing shrew, who doesn't hesitate to take advantage of Austin's tendency to be a doormat.
Speaking of Austin, with the cast pretty well balanced between Korean and non-Korean actors, Austin is the lynchpin character narratively, a half-Korean, half-Caucasian former sports star who is an aspiring personal trainer. He's gone for most of his life without much connection to his Korean heritage, and suddenly he's around all these Koreans, including the lovely interpreter Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), and his ethnicity is unexpectedly seen as an asset. The new opportunities mean new temptations to avoid and new expectations that he struggles to meet. I found one of the best moments in the whole season is the revelation of how fluent in Korean Austin actually is, during a pivotal moment. Charles Melton was absolutely the highlight of the show for me, along with Youn Yuh-jung getting to be more of a villain for once.
Isaac and Mulligan are probably the most familiar names in the cast, but Josh and Lindsay strike me as broader characters who aren't all that interesting, and their actors really have to do some heavy lifting to keep them engaging. They're the characters who are the most caught up in schemes and stratagems against everyone else, and are done the most disservice by the twisty nature of the plotting and a relatively straightforward disintegrating marriage storyline. There are class and race issues that could have been explored in their pairing that just never materialized, and the glimpses of their happier past together weren't enough to make it feel like there were real stakes to their conflicts. Issac and Mulligan are two of my favorite working actors at the moment, so this was the major disappointment of this season of "Beef" for me.
I'm still glad they're here, and I enjoyed the season overall, but this is a step down from the first season. However, I'm still rooting for the show, and I'd be happy to watch a third installment of "Beef" somewhere down the line.
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