Love Is War in Beef's Imperfect But Still Thrilling Second Season

Can love and capitalism peacefully coexist? As the wealth gap yawns ever wider, this has become a favorite question for storytellers to explore. The rom-com Materialists threw a matchmaker into a love triangle with a perfect-on-paper rich guy and the broke schlub who was her true soulmate. The Sicily-set second season of Mike White’s hit all-star tragicomic anthology series The White Lotus stirred a dollop of amore into its predecessor’s recipe for class strife at a high-end resort. Now, Lee Sung Jin is back with Season 2 of his hit all-star tragicomic anthology series Beef, and it, too, sits at the intersection of love and money. While the new episodes don’t offer quite the same depth of character or adrenaline rush as the original, the show remains a sharply observed, virtuosically acted, and artfully shot study of human behavior at its ugliest.

Following an Emmy-anointed debut that spun random road rage into a life-ruining feud born of repressed anger and rendered specific through the two strangers turned nemeses’ (Ali Wong and Steven Yeun) respective cultural identities, this season dissects the relationships within and between two couples. Oscar Isaac’s Josh Martin manages the exclusive Monte Vista Point Country Club, acting as the tireless concierge, companion, and fixer for elite members he considers personal friends. His dilettante-decorator wife, Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan), applies her upper-crust British taste to the club’s lush interiors. In public, they’re the perfect pair. But their home, as nice as it is, has become a graveyard for their dreams—namely, the popular elder-millennial fantasy of building it out into a “bespoke bed and breakfast” they would actually own. Now, in the rare moments he isn’t working, Josh unwinds with an expensive porn habit; a sexually frustrated Lindsay is deep into flirtatious text chains with other men.

One night, the spouses’ argument boils over into a brawl—and a very different couple stumbles upon them, both screaming like maniacs and poised to inflict cartoonish violence on each other. Twenty-somethings Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton) work at the club, she a drink-cart cashier who’s insecure about never having finished high school and he a college athlete turned part-time trainer whose efforts to build his own training business are stalling out. Broke but smitten, they are also so innocent, it would strain believability if Lee didn’t have such a knack for selective exaggeration. “If I were ever to raise my voice to you, I’d hope someone would report me,” Austin primly pledges to his girlfriend. In fact, he’d like to go to the cops with the cellphone video they’ve captured of what he interprets as Josh battering Lindsay.

Instead, the canny Ashley uses it to blackmail Josh into promoting her. She doesn’t expect her boss to retaliate as part of his own self-enrichment scheme. So begins a war between the two couples that, in the middle chapters of the eight-episode season, comes a bit too close to Season 1 in its tit-for-tat rhythms and thematic shading. Lee understands that intentions and outcomes don’t always match up; it’s hard to calibrate precisely how much your revenge plan is going to wound someone. But this ground was already well covered by Wong and Yeun’s arc, and their fury-driven characters evoked more empathy. It hurt to see them hurt each other.

More novel, and more entertaining, is the way Lee sets up this season’s ensemble as a nesting doll of No Exits, with each toxic couple trying to extort their way out from under a richer, more powerful pair. Austin is the dopily devoted underachiever to Ashley’s scrappy, love-starved striver. Social-climbing workaholic Josh has to live with the knowledge that his entitled wife feels she married below her station. At the club, every interaction is an implicit transaction—and that’s before the arrival of an exacting new owner, a South Korean billionaire addressed by her underlings as Chairwoman Park and played by Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung. Her much-younger husband is played by another Korean megastar, the frequent Bong Joon Ho collaborator Song Kang-ho. Do these overlords have their own extralegal agendas to impose upon Josh? Of course they do. And so everyone takes turns torturing everyone else. Alliances constantly shift as secrets slip out. Partners shred each other’s egos, then build them back up. Parties with common enemies become ad-hoc friends. Bosses go nuclear. Subordinates revolt. 

Season 1’s harrowing masterpiece of a two-hander finale would’ve been impossible to replicate. So Lee smartly escalates in a different direction, ramping up to a stylish, Korea-set climax that recalls the anticapitalist thrillers, like Bong’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, for which that country’s film industry is known. (In fact, when Beef shot in Seoul, Bong made a surprise appearance on set.) The genre shift gives the whole cast a chance to flex; Isaac is especially great, playing against intellectual-crank type as a glorified hustler with an absurd haircut who is fueled by desperation to be liked. In his oddly refreshing pessimism, Lee even lands on some questions that push a global conversation forward: If the simplest of minds instinctively understand that we can’t win at love and capitalism, why do we all insist on playing both games anyway? And in the final reckoning, where will those incompatible pursuits lead us?