“Let’s see what these terrible people will do next,” my wife said half-seriously as we settled in for another episode of the addictive Netflix series “Beef,” whose second season dropped last month.
That succinctly sums up one of my pet theories about the dubious measure of “likeability.” You will often hear folks say they prefer stories about characters they can “root for” to tales of unsympathetic jerks. But do they really? I think of the staying power of a tragedy like “Macbeth” or the lacerating comedies of Molière, not to mention the contemporary popularity of antiheroes on everything from “Breaking Bad” to “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I think of such flawed Biblical figures as David, Jonah and Peter. The idea that we value virtue in our characters isn’t just belied by our actual tastes; I think it’s also a false idol. For me, the baseline rule of storytelling is that we are interested in what happens; sympathy may arise but is not required.
Lee Sung Jin’s 2023 series “Beef” offered a rip-roaring case study for this theory. Telling the story of a mindless road-rage incident between an affluent businesswoman, Amy (Ali Wong), and a struggling handyman, Danny (Steven Yuen), that spirals into a harrowing if often hilarious revenge drama, the first “Beef” did not ingratiate us with its characters so much as entangle us in their ill-advised intrigues and make us feel queasily complicit in them. It also managed the difficult trick of depicting a specifically Asian-American world, including a major subplot involving a Korean American Christian church, without a trace of sanctimony.
The latest season of the show gives us a new set of characters on a bigger canvas, but the same thorny moral landscape. Its initial gambit is to compare and contrast two couples, one already on the rocks and the other headed for the shoals. When Josh (Oscar Isaac), the glad-handing general manager of a California country club, and his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), a thwarted interior designer, have a screaming, borderline-violent domestic fight after a party, they are caught on smartphone camera by Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), two earnest young club employees who are affianced and aspiring. A simple blackmail plot ensues, but it soon metastasizes into a web of schemes and counter-schemes involving the club’s new South Korean owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), and her pathetic plastic surgeon husband Dr. Kim (“Parasite” star Song Kang-ho).
The decadent-rich-behaving-badly satire may evoke HBO’s “The White Lotus,” while “Beef’s” first season felt closer to the deadpan black comedy of the hitman-turned-actor series “Barry.” But the bigger departure of the second season of “Beef” is its focus on couples, which gives it a more nuanced texture, for better and worse. Whereas the first season’s Amy and Danny were lone wolves with motives that were often opaque, even to themselves, the new season’s dyads show us both sides of every argument. Every dastardly stratagem now has a witting accomplice and shared consequences.
That makes the new “Beef” a bit meatier, but also a little softer; the new season doesn’t quite have the angry, anarchic electric charge of the original. And its thriller-esque plotting does feel a bit attenuated by its somewhat anticlimactic ending, set in a gleaming, futuristic-looking Seoul. What the series does have is powerhouse acting, starting at the top with Isaac and Mulligan, who are good at their couple’s loud, messy fights but even better at the subtle, passive-aggressive maneuvering; they beautifully and movingly enact the ironic drama of a couple feeling closer than ever as they consciously uncouple. Meanwhile, as the Gen Z strivers whose relationship is slowly poisoned by class envy and petty jealousy, Melton and Spaeny thread the needle of both satirizing their characters’ cluelessness and making us feel for them. And in Chairwoman Park, Youn gives us a cool, unsmiling villain who seems capable of anything except joy.
Ultimately, when a fiction puts our emotions through the wringer while striving to dramatize big dilemmas that highlight our human interconnectedness—all of which I can fairly say Lee has set out to do with “Beef”—the character I’m most interested in is not any of the writer’s fictional creations but his own character. Are we in the hands of a master entertainer with an obsessive streak, à la Hitchcock? Are we at the mercy of a bloody-minded nostalgist like Tarantino? Or, as in “The White Lotus,” are we being guided through scenes of giddy depravity by Mike White’s amused detachment?
My verdict, after watching two seasons of “Beef,” is that Lee has earned my trust as a storyteller. He has the crucial gift of acute social observation, and can construct scenes that both simmer with subtext and point the plot forward. More importantly, he has an engaging mix of ambition and epistemic humility—i.e., he has the courage to depict deeply flawed characters, and to trust that we’ll recognize aspects of ourselves without pronouncing his judgment on them.
Lee also adds more than a dose of spiritual perspective to the existential questions his stories raise: The first season concluded with a “Waiting for Godot”-like meditation in the desert, and both seasons end on a note of hard-won forgiveness. Apart from Lee’s characters, what’s not to like?
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