Beef ★★★★
If rage provided the connective tissue of season one of Lee Sung Jin’s series Beef, in which the enmity between Steven Yeun’s Danny and Ali Wong’s Amy spiralled ever more intensely from a minor altercation in a car park, season two is all about envy.
It opens with a scene of smarmy self-satisfaction, with Josh Martin (Oscar Isaac) thanking the guests at a country club fundraiser for their contributions to saving the frogs, and paying special tribute to his interior designer wife, Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan), “who helped put this thing together”.
She then grabs the microphone from him, saying, “Not so fast, mister. Let’s not forget about the best general manager this club has ever seen.” Cue rapturous cheering, applause and cries of “We love you, Joshie”.
The club is so upscale and so clubby that one of its members, Troy (William Fichtner), frequently whisks Josh away for spontaneous trips on his private jet. They’re friends, right, so why not? Except Josh doesn’t really have the resources to play in the same league as Troy and the other members, and their friendship is predicated on a blurring of the client/service-provider line. Which, naturally, has its limits.
Still, to Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a lowly food and beverage worker at the club, Josh and Lindsay seem to have it all. So when she and her personal trainer boyfriend, Austin (Charles Melton), catch the older couple in the middle of a terrible altercation, and just happen to capture it on video, she senses a chance to leapfrog a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder. And she feels utterly entitled to grab it.
Austin is nominally “part-Korean”, but the so-called Asian rage of season one isn’t so much at play here. Instead, it’s generational, educational and class-based envy.
More than once, Josh is labelled old, a Boomer, out-of-touch and privileged by Ashley. Never mind that she never even finished high school and has no skills to speak of – it’s her right, damn it, to order a large serve of everything on the American Dream menu. Austin – likeable, dim, malleable and as lacking in ambition as Ashley is rich in it – just wants whatever she’s having.
Flawed and compromised as everyone in this scenario is, it’s the arrival of a new owner, a Korean billionaire universally referred to (even by her plastic surgeon husband) as Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), that really puts the blow torch to the status quo. She’s every bit as opportunistic as Ashley, Josh and everyone else, but she’s way better resourced and a lot more brutal. She is cut-throat capitalism personified.
After Beef debuted three years ago, Lee Sung Jin said he envisaged his show as a three-season exercise, telling Rolling Stone, “there’s a lot of ways for Danny and Amy to continue”. But they are nowhere to be seen in this season, as the show has morphed into an anthology project of standalone storylines.
Thematically, though, there is continuity. If season one was about rage (let’s call it wrath), and season two is about envy, might it be drawing too long a bow to suggest Beef is working its way through the seven deadly sins?
Whatever it’s doing, I can’t get enough. And you can call that gluttony if you must.
Beef streams on Netflix from April 16.
