Beef
“I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so seen by a show, or felt so strongly that watching Beef has helped me to see others.”
Title: Beef
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creator: Lee Sung Jin 👨🏻🇰🇷🇺🇸
Directors: Lee Sung Jin 👨🏻🇰🇷🇺🇸 (1 ep), Hikari 👩🏻🇯🇵 (3 eps), and Jake Schreier 👨🏼🇺🇸 (6 eps)
Writers: Lee Sung Jin 👨🏻🇺🇸 (5 eps), Jean Kyoung Frazier 👩🏻🇺🇸 (1 ep), Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen 👩🏻🇺🇸 (1 ep), Kevin Rosen 👨🇺🇸 (1 ep), Joanna Calo 👩🏽🇺🇸 (1 ep), Niko Gutierrez-Kovner 👨🏽🇺🇸 (1 ep), Alice Ju 👩🏻🇺🇸 (1 ep), Carrie Kemper 👩🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), and Alex Russell 👨🇺🇸 (1 ep)
Reviewed by Elaine 👩🏻🇺🇸
—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 5/5
In a TV landscape where nearly everything seems to be a sequel, prequel, spin-off, remake, or reboot, Beef has been dropped onto our plates: slickly packaged yet visceral and raw. It’s the fresh cut of wagyu among the blackened overcooked steaks of the modern streaming world, and I promise that’s the last beef analogy this review will make.
The Netflix show kicks off with an unhinged road rage encounter between Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun), a small business owner and contractor respectively, and spirals into an all-consuming battle of wills that threatens to destroy everything and everyone around them. The writing is whip-smart, displaying an impressive self-confidence that doesn’t water anything down for the audience. It has several cultural easter eggs like the Botan Rice Candy box flung on the dirt in Danny’s childhood flashback sequence, or the wry “of course” expression on his face when he thinks his adversary is Japanese. Beef never overplays its hand with these casual details; they merely exist to create a fully lived-in experience. For all its outlandishness, Beef somehow captures the livewire energy of watching an off-kilter reality show.
Wong and Yeun are phenomenal here. They certainly showcase bravura acting, but Beef’s beauty lies in its micro-moments. As one of the subtlest actors working today, the best thing the camera can do for Yeun is to just capture whatever emotions flit across his face. And Beef does just that; the camerawork is generally unobtrusive, other than the occasional slow zoom-in to emphasize the claustrophobia Danny feels, or an extreme close-up on Amy during a confessional therapy session. Wong employs an incredible repertoire of painful smiles, and it encapsulates the tightrope Beef walks between drama and comedy: the very real tension of not knowing whether to cry or laugh at something.
Beef delivers all this while maintaining a lethal pace, pushing the boundaries of how much destruction two people can wreak in 30-to-40 minute increments. But it surprises us with how much depth it can pack into each episode, too. Beef eschews moral quandaries or doling out a simple lesson of “anger is bad.” It goes beyond asking “are these people good/evil?” to “can we understand their actions?” Creator, director, and writer Lee Sung Jin has masterfully crafted a story that brims with angst and tension, but these thrills aren’t of the cheap variety.
Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? Yes, but barely
Amy has few meaningful conversations with other women throughout Beef. Most of her interactions are superficial or adversarial. However, this naturally aligns with not only her character, but also Danny’s. Loneliness, rather than rage, may be Beef’s most significant impetus, so it stands that Amy often finds herself alone and pitted against the world.
Beef explores the nuances of that common loneliness. It humanizes Amy’s mother-in-law, Fumi (Patti Yasutake), with one simple scene of her eating lunch alone in a restaurant, elevating her above the overbearing mom stereotype she first appears as. Similarly, Ashley Park fantastically portrays Naomi, with all her insecurities as Amy’s frenemy. It doesn’t take much to round them out into sympathetic characters, which makes the few weak female caricatures more deplorable. These include the various seemingly interchangeable Korean American church girls, and Mia (Mia Serafino), Amy’s younger, white employee. Mia operates as a shallow foil to Amy: she has an “emotional affair” with Amy’s husband, George (Joseph Lee), and Amy uses her Instagram photos to catfish someone rather than assume another Asian identity.
Amy more than holds her own against Danny though. Beef unflinchingly portrays Amy’s very real flaws as well as the terrible things she does, but also gives her a complexity that allows us to root for her. Amy runs the whole gamut of emotions: from the poignant to the ridiculous (whatever Chekhov said about guns, he probably didn’t expect Beef’s particular method of introducing the item), and we’re with her every step of the way.
Lee originally wrote Amy’s character as a “Stanley Tucci type,” based on his own motorist run-in with a middle-aged white man, but Wong has made the role completely her own (and so much more interesting, besides). Though Tucci has incredible range, it’s hard to imagine the actor exuding Amy’s specific veneer of control, which barely holds back a bubbling cauldron of resentment.
Race: 5/5
There were times while watching Beef that I felt the show was written just for me, a Korean American kid who grew up in the 1990s. Part of that was in the small things, like the Konglish—Korean English—Danny throws around just as nonchalantly as he cracks an egg into his ramen. But more significantly, I saw myself in situations like in the first episode, when Mia tells Amy “I’m sorry” in Japanese to express her condolences. (Amy isn’t Japanese; she’s Chinese-Vietnamese, like Wong.) I could identify every single emotion Amy struggles with in those following few seconds, all the way down to how she forces a smile and then is left with disbelief and disgust that’s as much for herself as it is for Mia.
Beef is full of those excruciatingly familiar scenes, and some of its rage is synonymous to the Asian American experience: the generational trauma, the microaggressions of the SoCal elite that has supposedly evolved past racism, the expectation to suppress feelings. But Beef goes beyond that to expose how limiting the label of the so-called “Asian American experience” is. Characters come from different socio-economic backgrounds and face different struggles. More than any other show I’ve seen, Beef examines the different facets of what it means to be an East Asian American today, with all its inherent privileges and disadvantages, with all the different ways to embrace and disavow where we come from.
Beef also frames these struggles universally: We can all relate to the at times seemingly futile search for connection, or being angry at a stranger on the road. When Danny gets enveloped into the Korean American church culture, some will recognize that particular cocktail of acceptance and social pretense. But you don’t have to have directly suffered the egotism of a church basketball tournament to understand what it means to Danny to lead his team to victory. Yes, these cultural winks and nudges proliferate Beef for those of us already in the know, but they also serve as an invitation to those who aren’t.
Unsurprisingly, Beef’s diversity on camera matches what’s behind it. Asian and Asian American artists of color inhabit the writing room, the director’s chair, and Yeun and Wong are both executive producers. It’s no wonder that Beef presents a fully-inhabited world.
On the subject of choices in front of and behind the camera though, Beef’s decision to feature actor David Choe is inexplicable given his recently resurfaced podcast incident from 2014 where he recounted an incident and called himself “a successful rapist.” Regardless of his subsequent backtracking, it casts a pall on an otherwise stellar feature and talented crew. We have to ask, with its thoughtful characterization and meticulous presentation, why couldn’t Beef be just as intentional in its casting choices?
LGBTQ: 3/5
Beef includes two openly queer women, Naomi and Jordan (Maria Bello), a potential buyer for Amy’s company. Naomi’s late-season mention of bisexuality offers an intriguing layer to the character that’s been built thus far. She’s already insecure around Amy, who’s more fashionable, more financially independent. When Naomi begins to date Jordan, her insecurities only intensify as Jordan clearly has her own sights set on Amy. We welcome this complex dynamic … at least until it turns into what feels like a flimsy set-up for the climax. Jordan ends up with the most graphic death of the season, and although that may be the show’s indictment more of her excessive entitlement as a rich, white woman, it still doesn’t look pretty.
Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.25/5
Beef is the Muhammad Ali of shows: light on its feet even as it packs heavy punches. It crackles with the synergy of everyone at the top of their game. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so seen by a show, or felt so strongly that watching it has helped me to see others.
Like Beef? Try these other titles featuring Steven Yeun.
The Humans (2021)
Minari (2020)
Okja (2017)