[Netflix and A24’s Beef is astounding, anti-ambient TV.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEEF IS THE BEST SHOW NETFLIX HAS HAD IN RECENT MEMORY  
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Alex Abad-Santos
April 12, 2023
Vox
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_ Netflix and A24’s Beef is astounding, anti-ambient TV. _

Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, and Ali Wong’s wig — the three fantastic
actors in Netflix’s Beef, an absolutely perfect show., Courtesy of
Netflix

 

Alex Abad-Santos [[link removed]] is a
senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from
Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014.
Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

I have a simple test when it comes to good television: Did it make me
put my phone down?

I partake in what’s known as ambient TV, where there’s something
on while I’m folding laundry or cleaning up my living room or on my
phone, texting friends or tweeting to non-friends. The less interested
I am in a show, the more texts get sent, the crisper the folds are,
and the cleaner my coffee table is. To get me to forget my phone, my
T-shirts, and my dirty coffee table, a show has to knock me out.

And right now the show doing that is Netflix and A24’s
anxiety-inducing _Beef_.

My only texts to friends were in the brief seconds between each
episode.

“Did you start _Beef_?”

“I like that this is obliquely a show about hot Asians hotting
hottily”

“Ali Wong is doing fantastic stuff. Is this about her divorce? I
think it’s about her divorce.”

_Beef_ creates commanding television by twisting the idea of a
fateful encounter. Usually, when humans talk about chance meetings
with other humans, we think of the positive. Like there’s a one in 8
billion chance of meeting your soulmate, or it’s some kind of lucky
coincidence that a stranger may change your life for the better.
People come into your life for a reason, we’re told (often by people
who have seemingly come into our lives to dispense this saccharine
view of the world).

_Beef_ proposes the frightening scenario in which a
once-in-a-lifetime moment could result in finding your mortal enemy,
and the terrifying possibility that someone we’ve never met before
could change our lives for the worse.

In _Beef_, revenge isn’t just personal

Like all good tragedies, _Beef_ begins in a home improvement store
called Forster’s. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), who dreams of making
enough money to bring his hard-working parents back from Korea and
letting them retire, is faced with the grim reality of trying to
return multiple hibachi grills without a receipt. Anyone who has ever
tried knows that returning an item without a receipt is an impossible,
Sisyphean task, an endless loop of questions and answers designed to
break a person’s soul.

But Danny’s already broken, mainly because he’s extremely broke
— which also explains why he’s returning the hibachi grills.
Danny’s construction projects are few and far between, his parents
are back home in Korea struggling, and he’s taken it upon himself to
support not only himself but his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino).

In that same store but in a seemingly very different place in her life
is Amy Lau (Ali Wong), the founder of Kōyōhaus, a bougie plant
store. Amy is in the midst of brokering an acquisition deal with
Jordan Forster (Maria Bello), the head of Forster’s. Selling
Kōyōhaus to Jordan would mean millions of dollars for Amy and her
family, and a life where she can relax.

[An Asian man sits in a car wearing a hooded sweatshirt and holding a
small pair of binoculars near his face.]

Steven Yeun as Danny in _Beef_. In this scene, Danny is having a hard
day and almost arsons a toddler.

 Andrew Cooper/Netflix

Her husband George (Joseph Lee) and their daughter June (Remy Holt)
already live an extremely comfortable life full of pottery, cute dogs,
and meditation thanks to Amy’s ambition and sacrifice. Amy herself
has been too busy providing for her family to enjoy the life she’s
built, though. And Jordan is giving her the runaround, leveraging the
deal to get Amy to do whatever she asks, even though there are already
plenty of people in Amy’s life — her husband, her daughter, her
employees — asking too much of her.

Amy and Danny have just two things in common: They are at their limit
and they are in the Forster’s parking lot.

He’s backing out. She’s rushing home. She honks. He honks back.
She pauses and puts up a middle finger. A screeching episode of
Southern California road rage ensues — running red lights, swerving
up onto sidewalks, throwing bottled drinks, and cursing the other’s
existence.

Neither one can let the anger go, and it becomes a moment that changes
their lives forever.

Instead of brushing it off, Amy and Danny each memorize the other’s
license plate and begin an escalating war of terror. Danny visits her
house under the pretense of being a good Samaritan contractor. He asks
to use the bathroom and pees all over her renovated commode.

Amy retaliates by spray-painting his beat-up truck with insults like
“I am poor.” Danny almost arsons Amy’s luxury SUV with her
daughter inside it, and that’s just in the third episode. Danny’s
decision not to set Amy’s SUV ablaze with a toddler inside is one of
the few, brief moments of relief that showrunner Lee Sung Jin gives
the audience over the show’s 10 propulsive episodes.

What makes _Beef_ so anxiety-inducing and so gripping is that it
fully explores what it means to hurt someone. Sure, Amy and Danny
could resort to violence and physically harm the other, but that’s
almost too simple. They want more.

As they learn more about each other, they both realize they can do the
most hurt by taking aim at the people the other person loves most. And
as the show unfurls, there’s an increasing, heart-in-your-stomach
fear that Danny will go after June or George or that Amy may retaliate
by hurting Paul or Danny’s parents — innocent people who have no
part in this feud.

The more Amy and Danny ramp up their feud, the more vulnerable their
family members become. Amy and Danny inadvertently distance themselves
from their loved ones, in an effort to keep their escalating war a
secret. And insidiously, Amy and Paul become more entrenched in each
other’s lives.

_Beef_’s ending was perfect, it doesn’t need another season

_Beef’_s revenge tragedy finds success mainly because of Yeun and
Wong’s stellar performances. The series wouldn’t work if Amy and
Danny were just reprehensible sociopaths. Sociopaths don’t feel
loss, and if either of these characters slipped into that
territory, _Beef_ would have no tension. Amy and Danny need to have
dreams and desires that the audience believes in and wants to see them
achieve, and both Yeun and Wong imbue their characters with humanity
to achieve that. Especially Wong, who showed flashes of her acting
ability in Amazon’s _Paper Girls _and a nuanced understanding of
married life in her standup specials. She creates a shambling and
quietly ferocious Amy. It doesn’t hurt that Lee Sung Jin’s
material is top-notch.

[An Asian woman in octagonal-frame glasses and a silver bobbed wig
sits looking out from her car.]

Ali Wong as Amy Lau, and Ali Wong’s wig as Amy Lau’s bad-bitch
bob.

 Andrew Cooper/Netflix

While _Beef_ is primarily about vengeance, it sizzles as class
warfare commentary and, at times, a satire of the intersections of
wealth and ethnicity in America.

The fascinating thing in _Beef_ is that the class struggle is told
through a distinct Asian-American lens_. Beef_’s writers understand
that the Asian-American experience isn’t a monolith. Those
experiences are influenced by affluence, ethnicity, immigration, and
assimilation, among other things. _Beef_’s writers aren’t afraid
to explore the power and privilege dynamic of Amy, a child of Chinese
and Vietnamese immigrants, marrying George, a Japanese man who came
from money and whose mother speaks perfect English. Though she does
not have writing credits on the show, Wong has touched upon
[[link removed]] similar subjects in her
standup comedy.

George and Amy never see the world, see ambition, see their lives, and
see each other in the same way. She never feels good enough, and he
can’t begin to understand that. An added layer is Danny, who comes
from a working-class Korean family, flatly resents that both these
people can’t quite recognize how blessed they are.

Richer than everyone on the show is Bello’s Jordan — a character
who at one point mourns the matching earrings for one of her many
tribal headdresses, which she had to return to the Peruvian
government. She’s the show’s absurd, eat-the-rich main course.
Jordan is always gliding in and out of Amy’s life, aware enough to
hold the deal over Amy’s head but not fully cognizant of the
resentment. This is its own type of privilege, the inability to
comprehend that the Asian-American woman whose life she’s making
absolute hell totally hates her.

It’s fitting then that this aloof heiress’s fantastic compound in
some rural, undisclosed Southern California location is
where _Beef_ finds its maximalist climax.

[Image reads “spoilers below,” with a triangular sign bearing an
exclamation point.]

_Beef_ spoilers below.

After inadvertently kidnapping June, Danny runs into his cousin Isaac
(David Choe), who is on the run from gangsters. Isaac owes the gang
money. Danny owes Isaac money. Isaac takes June and uses her as
ransom, extorting Amy for $500,000 she doesn’t easily have. Instead
of paying cash, Amy finagles a plan for Isaac and his goons to rob
Jordan’s house, which leads to a shootout, Jordan accidentally
bisected by her state of the art panic room, and Amy and Danny running
each other off the road and over a cliff.

Given the height of the fall and the fragility of human bones, Amy and
Danny should be dead. But, I guess, hating someone can be enough to
keep you alive; a powerful motivating factor to survive to see them
die. Beaten up and broken, the two get high on poisonous berries and
finally come to see the totality of their feud; how a parking lot
incident may result in both of them lonely and dying at the dusty
bottom of a Southern California canyon.

Yeun and Wong play the final episode beautifully, as each character
gives the other a cathartic therapy session. Amy tells Danny that she
hates George’s art, that his vases are ugly, and that she never felt
at home with him. Danny tells Amy that he never stopped thinking of
Paul as a kid, and never saw Paul as the man he is. They both talk
about being seen, who they really are, and where their anger comes
from. And all they needed was someone to listen.

When morning comes, Amy and Danny, now unusually close, make their way
back to the main road and ostensibly civilization. George, who has
been tracking Amy’s phone, interrupts them. He’s holding a gun
and, believing Danny to be violent, shoots him. The final scenes have
Amy silently curling up next to Danny in his hospital bed as he
recovers. Amy’s future with her family is unclear, as is Danny and
his. Just as when the show began, in this moment, Amy and Danny are
the only people that exist to each other.

In an interview with Rolling Stone,
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Sung Jin said that there has been no word on renewal, but that he’s
plotted out three seasons in his head. Full disclosure: I am not a
showrunner and am simply just a consumer, but I think another season
of Danny and Amy’s story would be a mistake.

Both of them realizing and understanding the person on the other end
of their feud, and finding a way to forgive not just that person but
also themselves, was such a moving end to this ulcer-inducing season.
I don’t need to find out what happens to these characters going
forward, whether that’s Amy patching up things with George or Danny
making a full recovery and reaching out to Paul. I also am not
terribly interested in a storyline featuring this pair’s regression,
which would inevitably lead us back to the same story of escalation.
It’d more than likely wipe away the stakes that kept me invested. As
much as I want to see more of Ali Wong and Steve Yeun, they’ve told
Amy and Danny’s story to its perfect, satisfying end.

That said, I would fully support _Beef_ done in an anthology style
with a whole new set of characters — a different beef in a different
place, with two new people destined to ruin their lives over someone
they hate. I wouldn’t even be the slightest bit opposed to Wong and
Yeun coming back and playing different characters. What I’d hate to
see is _Beef _overdone and overworked, so that it no longer
resembles the kind of show that would stop me from doing laundry.

* beef
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* NETFLIX
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* Asian representation
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* class warfare
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