‘Beef’, once Netflix's best show, doesn't feel gourmet anymore

“They say comparison is the thief of joy,” says Lindsey, played by Carey Mulligan, in the new season of Beef on Netflix. This second season, featuring couples in various stages of disrepair and dysfunction, could be built around that line, given all the resentment and discontent that stems from the grass being greener on the other side. Surely, we think alone and together, their problems must be better than our problems. We could, and should, have more.

Tragically, that line also comes back to haunt the series as a whole. While it provides serviceable drama with a cast of strong actors, this new Beef suffers immensely in comparison with its extraordinary first season. Lee Sung Jin created a thing of beauty and horror, a show where a moment of impulsive road-rage unlocked something within two discontented protagonists who discovered meaning — and themselves — in their vengeance. Ali Wong and Steven Yeun were phenomenal, as the show went down metaphysical and meaningful roads to explore the many ways the world gets under our collective skins. It was easily my top show of 2023, which is why I’m heartbroken by this follow-up being entirely unremarkable.

Mulligan’s Lindsey is a throw-pillow obsessed decorator married to Josh (Oscar Isaac), the General Manager at an exclusive country club, the sort of fellow who is compelled to gamble with Michael Phelps. Alas, this isn’t quite the Inside Llewyn Davis reunion one may have hoped for. The two are frequently at each other’s throats, violently throwing around blame and — one particularly hairy night — they come close to knocking each other’s heads off, with him raising his golf club at her, poised to strike.

This near-savagery is witnessed — perhaps even halted — by the arrival of Ashley and Austin, who work at the country club and have come by their boss’s place to drop off his wallet. The trespassers have videoed the loud altercation, then scampered off. “Couples fight, it’s normal,” Lindsey rationalises, reassuring herself out loud. “We’re normal.” Everyone wants it to be normal, at any rate. Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) doesn’t want any trouble, while her fiancé Austin (Charles Melton) wants to make sure Lindsey is safe. Nobody, it appears, wants to rock the boat.

At least at first.

As in season one, things escalate. Lindsey and Josh have a fraught marriage, Josh’s job is in trouble, Ashley needs medical insurance, Austin is looking up Reddit comments to figure out if he’s being cheated upon. Something has gotta give, and in this blackmail-friendly scenario, everyone does. All while a Korean billionaire Chairwoman Park (played by Youn Yuh-jung from Minari) is buying the country club and has nefarious ideas of her own.

The performances are mostly solid, though Spaeny tries too hard as Ashley. Isaac is a reliably powerful performer, showing us the complete unravelling of a privileged and handsome man, one who has to namedrop to prove his self worth. Mulligan is great as Lindsey, insecure about her jawline and her sex appeal, forever blocking and unblocking old flames on messaging apps. She has the show’s best lines, and is righteously aggrieved by their young blackmailers-to-be: “We have so many more years experience being petty,” she whines.

Melton is overwhelmed as Austin — the pseudo physical therapist now in charge of the club’s athletic rollout — who unironically believes that love is the answer, to everything. (He’s 29, to which Lindsey involuntarily says Aw.) Seoyeon Jang is lovely as Chairwoman Park’s interpreter Eunice, superbly deadpanning lines like “They are not currently saying anything worth translating.” William Fichtner has a really good time as Josh’s insanely wealthy private-jet owning friend Troy. The shame is watching the great Song Kang-Ho, of Parasite and Memories Of Murder, being wasted in a small, silly role as Park’s husband.

Small and silly. It’s what being petty invariably reduces us to, and all the characters on the new Beef keep getting cut down to size in various ways. Except that television today is filled with stories of nasty marriages and eat-the-rich satirising, critiques of late-stage-capitalism that are almost always ironically produced on larger scales than they need to be. We may as well have called it ‘The Spite Lotus’. There you have it, a small and silly cut-down for a show which had, in my opinion, the finest first season in Netflix history.

Even the retaliation gets repetitive this time. Someone befouls an orange juice, someone befouls a Shirley Temple. By the time the rushed — and jarringly slapstick — climax rolls around, everyone has had so many changes of heart that the characters might need to be hospitalised for emotional whiplash. The writing feels considerably less clever, with most of the pop-culture lines and references feeling extraneous to the script and situations — though there is one cracking line comparing the pain scale to the Letterboxd rating system.

Sometimes a great miniseries should remain a great miniseries.

I believe showrunner Lee Sung Jin has tried to cater to too many people, and perhaps — dealing with more hype, greater budget and greater expectations — been burdened by too many cooks. The Beef served up this time is a stew, one I’ve tasted before and one I wouldn’t necessarily recommend. Call me a thief of joy, but I reread my review from 2023 this morning and immediately craved season one all over again. Now that… that was Well Done.

Streaming Tip Of The Week:

Egyptian comedian Ramy Youssef’s latest special In Love (JioHotstar) is provocative and sharp, a powerful and hilarious take on the way we look at religion, racism, weddings and pets. That finale — one that involves a father, a son and a lady from Ghost — is something else.

Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.