Beef Season 2 Review: Anxiety Is the Latest Obsession in Netflix’s Angry Thriller

The first season of Beef brought together two people from very different circumstances and put them on a collision course. Creator Lee Sung Jin’s second season approaches the conflict from a different angle, with two couples at the center of this season’s proverbial problem, layers of fiction present as the relationships evolve and mutate, orbiting each other in a game of obsession.

Josh (Oscar Isaac) is the general manager of Monte Vista Point Country Club while his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) spends most of his time redecorating it. The long-married couple dreams of transforming their woodland home into a bed and breakfast/music venue, a project they discuss breathlessly while under Molly, but these naturally fall apart when they are forced to face a sober reality. There is a tension in their relationship that they cannot shake.

This may be due to Josh’s problematic relationship with sex or Lindsay’s resentment towards him for his position, even though it provides him with an extremely comfortable life. This tension comes to a head early on, culminating in a fight on the floor where Josh and Lindsay trade blows and are caught in a compromising position by a young couple.

Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) don’t really seem to know how the world works, but they’re so obsessed with each other that it doesn’t matter. Austin, a personal trainer, regurgitates fitness tips he learned on YouTube to his clients while Ashley walks the club’s green, selling White Claws to golfers who have paid the $300,000 initiation fee.

Like Josh and Lindsay, Ashley and Austin also have dreams. Theirs are a little smaller — one is getting health insurance, for starters — but they’re dreams nonetheless. Ashley, ultimately, sees Josh and Lindsay’s fight as a way to make those dreams come true, or at least start making them come true. It doesn’t matter if Ashley and Austin aren’t the brightest (one particular laugh-out-loud moment sees Ashley misunderstanding what a franchise is). Their dreams still matter.

It is at the heart of Beef season 2. Who society validates by leading the way, how a hyper-capitalist world compromises our morals, and why, at the end of it all, we are like ants, marching together in line toward the promise of something better, with no way of knowing if we’ll ever get there.

Beef season 2 is a comedy of errors

Lee maintains Beef‘s acidic sense of humor in its second season, poking fun at both couples to great effect. At first, it seems like the show is only making fun of Austin and Ashley, who seem more overt in their naivety. But just because Josh and Lindsay are jaded doesn’t mean they’re not naive. Both couples handle situations like they’re the smartest people in the room, but they get it wrong time and time again.

When a new owner takes over Monte Vista Point, Josh and Lindsay are quickly forced to reassess their position within the club’s social strata. Youn Yuh-jung plays President Park, the club’s billionaire benefactor, who traps Josh in her own schemes involving her slippery-fingered surgeon husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), still back in Korea as Park evaluates her new investment. The three couples are inevitably linked, especially as Ashley takes advantage of Austin’s half-Korean heritage to find a relationship with the president and her assistant Eunice (Seoyeon Jang).

There are a lot of stories and this sprawling narrative doesn’t always work BeefThis is the favor. There’s a lack of cohesion that stands in stark contrast to the tighter storytelling of its predecessor. This kind of radical history, however, gives Beef a different feeling this time. While Ali Wong and Steven Yeun’s chapter focused on the complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships on an intimate level, Season 2 feels more like a Great American Story, a parable about the destructive force of capitalism and how the pursuit of something that seems better may just make you worse.

There are touches of themes from the first season — how race comes into play in the predominantly white world of country clubs, how anger and resentment breed irrationality, and how easy it is to be alone in a time when we are all so connected. A silent anxiety hums just beneath the surface, a nagging feeling that something bad could happen at any moment, the specter of emotional and physical violence around every corner.

When the show hits the heights of its first season, there’s a tension there, the show unravels into something a little more complicated. As a conspiracy grows and envelops all of our main characters, Beef Season 2 may seem heavy-handed, but Lee and his co-directors Jake Schreier and Kitao Sakurai maintain a sleek visual style that evolves as the series progresses.

The performances of the actors also evolve. Melton and Spaeny have more to give than first meets the eye – airheads Ashley and Austin may seem like they don’t have chemistry or common sense, but both actors peel back the couple’s layers, revealing them to be just as devious as Josh and Lindsay. There is a cyclical theme to Beef season 2 this way; the world can be an endless feedback loop of exploitation and opportunity, to which self-adaptation is relevant at all times.

The emotional changes mirror those in tone, and while it sometimes feels like a bug rather than a feature this time around, Beef season 2 still maintains the electric unpredictability that is becoming a hallmark of the series. Blood or tears can be shed, a quiet moment of affection can turn into doubt and distrust, and someone can become the worst version of themselves at any moment.

All episodes of Beef season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

Release date

April 6, 2023

Network

Netflix

Showrunner

Lee Sung Jin

Directors

Hikari, Jake Schreier, Kitao Sakurai, Lee Sung Jin

Writers

Alice Ju