For all the intensity and acting firepower of Beef’s buzzy first season, I didn’t exactly walk away from it craving more, given its largely unsympathetic characters and their thorny, bickering interactions. Its renewal came as quite a surprise, but creator/showrunner Lee Sung Jin smartly reinvents the series for its second run, pivoting to an anthology format to tell a similarly intense but otherwise quite different story.
Season two’s eponymous conflict involves two couples whose relationships are tested by money and ambition. The first, Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsey (Carey Mulligan), are desperate for upward mobility; Josh is the glad-handing general manager of an Ojai, California country club, while Lindsey, a frustrated designer, stands beside him helping with fundraising and event management. Outwardly successful, they are in fact merely wealth-adjacent, an illusory friendliness with the billionaire class masking their ultimate servility. None of this is apparent to young, working-class Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), a moony-eyed couple employed under Josh at the club. Ashley works the beverage cart and Austin is a part-time physical trainer; they’re basically living hand to mouth. When they’re enlisted to return Josh’s wallet after an event, they arrive just in time to witness the older couple’s frustrations boil over into a physical altercation, which Ashley, initially without ill intent, films on her phone. But the awkward encounter, exacerbated by the lopsided power dynamic of the workplace, leads both couples into a series of increasingly desperate decisions to save both their relationships and their professional ambitions — but at great expense.
Similar to the first, Beef’s second season presents a chaotic cause-and-effect escalation between two misunderstood and misunderstanding parties. There’s also an important, powerful third layer to the conflict involving the Korean billionaire, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), who has just acquired the country club — placing additional downward pressure on the principals and entangling Austin in an enlightening contemplation of his mixed-race heritage. Beyond those elements, though, the show feels much different in season two, repurposing the tightly focused character study of the original limited series into an anthology platform in the vein of Fargo or The White Lotus. This perhaps makes it feel more derivative, but there’s a reason those shows are so successful, and season two takes advantage of the conceptual springboard to try something different while still maintaining a focus on the class warfare and cultural disconnects that create so much societal friction in a ruthless capitalist world. Unsurprisingly, Isaac, Mulligan, Spaeny, and Melton are all terrific as the scheming quartet at the center of the drama, but their hapless, generally unlikeable characters are easier to rally around thanks to a story that pits them in opposition to the inexorable systemic corruption that has warped their values and riven their relationships. Unfortunately, the final couple of episodes don’t quite connect all the logistical dots, rushing to tie everything off in a manner that is entertainingly frantic but perhaps thematically muddled. Overall, though, it’s a solid follow-up, richly envisioned and full of unexpected developments that may well be more interesting and satisfying than its predecessor.
