Binge & Purge: Beef, Season 2

NOTE: From time to time, I like to write my reactions to a series upon completing a binge. What follows are my thoughts on the recent season of Beef, which dropped last Thursday on Netflix. My wife and I finished it in two days.

Season 2 of Lee Sung Jin's outstanding Beef feels more like a riff on Mike White's The White Lotus than Beef Season 1. This isn't a complaint. Lee Sung Jin, like White, mines a setting that caters to ridiculously privileged people as a means for satirizing power, class, and interpersonal relationships. Both shows play in the same sandbox but are building very different castles.

They each view relationships as transactional, fundamentally dysfunctional, and one life-altering event away from ending in catastrophe. Even the slightest kindess can be seen as strategic. The White Lotus skewers the way wealthy and privileged elite are really empty vessels needing filled. It views its subjects with a detached lens. Beef wants us to get into the muck with its characters. The White Lotus is observational. All of us are Walton Goggins in Season 3 Episode 5 listening to Sam Rockwell's monologue about going from a bored man hiring ladyboys to actually hiring himself out as one. Isn't this wild?

Where Mike White feels more like an anthropologist, Lee Sung Jin throws into the deep end of the emotional chaos between two couples, both of who work at an elite country club. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan are Joshua and Lindsay Martin, a couple in their late thirties/early forties. Joshua is the general manager of the club, Lindsay is a decorator. One night they get into a horrific argument. One of those that married couples have when they are truly sick of one another's bullshit. It turns violent. The whole event is captured on a cellphone video by Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny). She and her fiance Austin Davis (Charles Melton), seemingly nice but cash-strapped people who also work at the club, see this as an opportunity to blackmail Joshua into promoting them both at the club. From there, like Season 1 of Beef, a volatile clash sets in motion a series of events that exposes the cracks in the couples' relationships. Lee Sung Jin and his writers and directors tighten the vice on us as viewers much quicker than Mike White's more slow burn approach (which works perfectly for The White Lotus). White invites to a place meant to bring relaxation and decadent spoils that is really a pot of water set to simmer. The water warms slowly but once it boils, it's scalding. Beef throws into the boiling water right away and tells us we have to swim.

Season 1 of Beef does this, too. Right away we meet Danny Cho and Amy Lau (Steven Yeun and Ali Wong). Two lonely LA people who get involved in a road rage incident that escalates into a prolonged feud. Danny and Amy fight each other, dragging others along as collateral damage. We're left wondering what is wrong with these people? Am I like this?

Season 2, while still an examination of the power plays inherent in interpersonal relationships, pulls its view further away. Less relational, more systemic. Season 1 is how people are trapped within their own toxicity. Season 2 is about how we're all trapped in a system designed to cater to a privileged few, leaving the rest of us scrambling for some sense of purpose and meaning. We're left fighting with each other instead of focusing on the larger issue: the system that keeps us fighting. We're left wondering what is wrong with everyone? Are we all like this?

And that more holistic approach is another similarity this season of Beef has with The White Lotus. Wealth is a pressure cooker and privilege is a carefully curated illusion. And toxic co-dependency threatens to take us all down.

If you've never watched Beef on Netflix, give it a look. It's a brilliant show.