If one were looking to sum up Beef in a single image, it might be a face staring directly into the camera with a smile stretched forcibly across its face and eyes that betray the existential despair behind them. The Netflix series, which was created by Lee Sung Jin and co-produced by A24, embodies the popular “this is fine” meme, exploring the desperate impulse to shrug your shoulders as the world burns around you.
The hilarious but gut-wrenching dramedy begins with the opposite of a meet-cute—an unmistakable instance of hate at first sight. Danny (Steven Yeun) is pulling out of a parking lot when a car horn erupts behind him. The driver, Amy (Ali Wong), flips him off before speeding away as Danny tears after her, leading to a furious car chase that will ultimately send both of their lives careening in different and very dangerous directions.
Danny and Amy’s feud quickly escalates into a tit-for-tat game of vengeance: vehicles are graffitied, family members are catfished, bathroom floors are desecrated, and so on. The stakes get higher and higher with each episode until it’s genuinely hard to believe that all this drama was sparked by a little bit of inconsiderate driving. But while Beef is a bitingly funny comedy about what might happen if we just absolutely refused to let something go, it also deftly switches gears into a sincerely moving story about two people in immense emotional pain.
Despite its opening adrenaline rush, Beef takes its time to firmly embed us in the personal lives of its protagonists across 10 half-hour episodes. On the surface, Danny and Amy couldn’t be more different. Amy is the owner of a thriving plant business which she’s about to sell for millions. She has a doting husband (Joseph Lee), a beautiful daughter (Remy Holt), and a gorgeous home, though her relentless work schedule means that she never gets to spend as much time with any of them as she would like.
While Amy’s life is full to the point of bursting, Danny’s is defined by lack. His contracting company can’t get off the ground no matter how hard he hustles. He dreams of building a home for his parents but has to settle for doing odd jobs on other people’s houses. He has no partner—just a doltish younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), who stopped looking up to him years ago.
Yeun and Wong excel at delivering both the sunny personas that Amy and Danny are trying to project to the world and the shadowy figures creeping out from behind them. They deliver big, slightly oversized comic performances to match the mildly absurd tone of the series but never lose touch with its underlying reality. The camera regularly pushes right in on their faces, picking out the little micro-expressions that betray the emotions that the characters are working so hard to conceal, and revealing just how close Danny and Amy are to breaking at all times.
Yeun and Wong also thoroughly sell the idea of Danny and Amy as people who simply can’t stand each other. Theirs is a sort of inverted sexual chemistry where you can feel their physical revulsion in every gesture. And the series smartly keeps them physically apart most of the time, rendering their encounters even more electric as a result.
And yet, Lin clearly doesn’t share this loathing for either of his characters. Even as the story pushes Danny and Amy toward increasingly selfish and destructive decisions, they’re never completely unsympathetic. Thanks to the complexity of both the writing and performances, we always understand why the two of them feel compelled to act in such wildly unreasonable ways, even if they aren’t sure themselves. In fact, Beef extends that sympathy to its entire cast of characters, from Paul to Amy’s overbearing mother-in-law, Fumi (Patti Yasutake).
There are times when Beef’s mix of deliciously dark comedy and gentle-hearted empathy doesn’t quite coalesce. A few of the season’s later episodes conclude with dramatic events that seem set to push Danny and Amy’s feud into much more severe territory, only for the following episode to quickly reveal that actually things weren’t as bad as they seemed and nothing has really changed. It’s a bait-and-switch that becomes less effective over time. But that doesn’t make the show’s complicated, compassionate depiction of mental health or riotous portrayal of just how liberating it can be to indulge our pettiest impulses any less satisfying to sink your teeth into.
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