EHere’s a minor incident that made big waves on Beef: In a parking lot, Danny Cho (Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead) and Amy Lau (comedian Ali Wong) clash over the right-of-way. Wild car horns and angry fingers escalate into a chase that kills several Californian front yards and almost a few horrified road users, and which finally leads to a hair-raising revenge campaign.
But what’s really being laid bare here, as Danny and Amy battle each other in half-hour episodes each, is the immense pressure the two protagonists are under in a society that demands constant success, where you’re constantly measuring yourself against the accomplishments of others and the Insults and petty claims of others have to endure in order not to get under the wheels.
Anything that can go wrong goes wrong
The ten-part series is by Lee Sung Jin and is almost entirely filled with Asian characters. Yeun plays a self-employed handyman at the bottom of the social ladder who struggles to survive with tedious small jobs while he hopes to grow his business into a big corporation. But nothing works – his clients make fun of him, his brother Paul (Young Mazino) flirts with clients instead of working. And the money Danny borrows from his criminal cousin Issac (David Choe as a dangerous berserker) ends up in a bitcoin crash.
Ali Wong’s Amy is married to George (Joseph Lee as the smug do-gooder), the son of a respected family of artists, and moves in the upper cultural spheres of Los Angeles. She tries desperately not only to mirror her husband’s relaxed nonchalance, but also to meet the unachievable demands of her mother-in-law Fumi (Patti Yasutake). Amy has built a cool business that she hopes to sell to a manipulative billionaire Jordan (Maria Bello) in order to be a better mother to her baby daughter June (Remy Holt), but the price is her strained friendship with the egomaniacal art collector high. For Danny and Amy, the argument becomes an outlet for their life frustration, and the more the intrigue escalates, the more inevitable a real catastrophe becomes.
Characters with tremendous frustration
Lee Sung Jin has created a fast-paced narrative that is inspired by black humor and still manages to put the humanity of its characters in the foreground. The fact that this succeeds so effortlessly here is also thanks to the actors, who combine the immense frustration of their characters with a ruthless insight into their emotional world. Amy Wong’s expression reflects their conflicting emotions – sheer anger overlaid by an attempt to smile; the desperate fear of not being enough coupled with an iron determination to do their thing. When her husband reminds her, smiling mildly, that “anger is only a passing state of consciousness,” you want to follow the desire in her gaze and gag it.
Steven Yeun radiates so much tension as Danny that you can almost feel it physically, and when in his church group, which he unexpectedly finds himself in, people sing about the “embracing of my enemy” and play peace-joy-pancakes, you know it, just like Danny not whether to laugh or cry.
“Beef” isn’t afraid to look deep into the protagonist’s heart and brain, and the supporting characters are so vividly drawn and acted that one feels reminded of “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones”. “Beef” is also visually remarkably stylish. Los Angeles is anonymous backdrop, not glamorous backdrop, and Danny’s seedy bachelor pad contrasts effectively with Amy’s stylish, devoid of personal touches (this art-loving series, incidentally, delivers a scathing judgment on the faded self-infatuation of LA’s self-declared artists and connoisseurs).
“Why did you make me do this?” Danny yells into the night in one scene, and it’s a key line of the show, with everyone feeling compelled to do misdeeds by someone else. But beneath the surface, it all revolves around the characters’ struggles to escape the crippling sense of loneliness and fear of being unloved. The fact that the series, instead of slipping into melodrama, finds absurd moments in it is just as much to her credit as the respect she pays to her characters. It’s a small miracle that she also manages to give the drama a comic and poetic ending. Such an entertaining and at the same time clever series has not been seen on Netflix for a long time.
beef is available on Netflix.
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