Millennials (as represented by Carey Mulligan’s Lindsay and Oscar Isaac’s Josh) and Gen Z (Charles Melton’s Austin and Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley) prove equally ripe targets for Beef’s scorn, but the core villain of season two is those who worship the almighty dollar.
Photo: Netflix

In the second season of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef, “The customer is always right” takes on enormous, repellant implications at a California country club. Wealthy club members are allowed to do whatever they please. The club’s owners shruggingly crush employees’ dreams of upward mobility. There are all kinds of scams going on, people taking advantage others’ desires to be thinner, wealthier, happier. Noticeably not on the menu of offerings, however: enlightenment. Beef isn’t suggesting that any of its rich characters would want peace or even know what to do with it. Not when there’s tennis to be played, White Claws to be chugged, and employees to sexually harass.

On the surface, this is a major shift for Beef, whose first season was initially about the enmity between two people involved in a road-rage incident that spun out of control. But in both seasons, the now-anthology series has questioned why people are the way they are and how access, gatekeeping, and money conspire to make us lose sight of ourselves. Those questions will be familiar for anyone who has watched The White Lotus, and, now that Beef follows the overlapping tensions among Monte Vista Point’s owners, employees, and members, comparisons with that series will be inevitable. But those comparisons won’t do The White Lotus any favors, since Beef is more effective than that series’ second and third seasons in interrogating how exclusive locations sharpen class differences. The country club isn’t a respite in Beef — it’s the whole world — and Lee’s new story is more wacky, condescending, romantic, and nastily, wonderfully furious than the already nastily and wonderfully furious first season.

Millennials and Gen Z prove equally ripe targets for Lee’s scorn, but the core villain here is the one percent — those who worship the almighty dollar and who bank on the rest of us debasing ourselves to acquire it and abandoning our morals to hold on to it. This season examines how money distorts relationships, in particular romantic partnerships, through a generational lens: 40-something marrieds Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), 20-something fiancés Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), and senior-citizen billionaires Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and her second husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho). What drives their love, Beef asks, and how easy would it be to nudge that feeling toward hate? In its first go-round, Beef was ripe with curiosity about first-gen immigrant families and how the fear of leaving home stagnates and sullies us. This second season is once again poking at inertia and stasis and how romantic relationships can crumble into a series of self-destructive choices. But Lee is also layering in so much else — how a shared ethnic background can feel like affirmation in a way nothing else does, the resentment that festers between generations who don’t understand each other, the monotonous pursuit of money and power and how we equate it with finding meaning in our lives — that Beef feels bigger, unwieldier, and ultimately more thought-provoking than its first season.

Beef’s Monte Vista Point is near Ojai and Montecito, California, two areas that have a hippie-ish, liberal reputation but are also incredibly cloistered, the kind of places where oranges hang heavy on trees, then fall to the ground and rot because the wealthy homeowner couldn’t be bothered to pick them. For years now, Josh has been the club’s manager, responsible for glad-handing everyone and keeping them happy as they spend millions of dollars there, and he considers some of these rich people his friends, like the private-jet-owning Troy (William Fichtner). Josh grew up struggling, and this job has helped fund a man cave full of sports memorabilia and a Minimoog synthesizer with which Josh still hopes to make music. His freelance interior-designer wife, Lindsay, isn’t so deluded. She’s a Brit who dated a member of the royal family before marrying Josh, and her frustrations with her husband have piled up over time like so many throw pillows, an obsession of hers that occupies an entire shed on their property.

In a barn-burning fight that kicks off the season, Isaac and Mulligan — who played a more restrained version of a dysfunctional couple in Drive — tear into each other like they’re in a Cassavetes joint, with Lindsay insulting Josh’s lack of follow-through and his misguided belief that the club’s members actually care about him and Josh mocking Lindsay’s haughtiness and accusations that he ruined her life. When Lindsay says she hates Josh, he laughs; when he says he’s glad they didn’t have kids, she lunges at him with a golf club. It’s a thrilling, agonizing sequence made even more so when Austin and Ashley — Josh’s subordinates at the club — unexpectedly show up to return Josh’s wallet that he left at work. They film what looks to them like Josh attacking Lindsay and declare their terms: They’ll keep the video to themselves if Josh and Lindsay can make it worth their while. Josh wouldn’t want the club’s new owner, Chairwoman Park, to see it and reconsider whether she really wants this violent, misogynistic man to run her property, would he?

Beef takes off from there, laying out intersecting circles of power and competition. There’s a classist hierarchy with Chairwoman Park at the top, Josh and Lindsay in the middle, and Austin and Ashley at the bottom, and as Josh and Lindsay face off against Austin and Ashley, Lee and his collaborators sketch out a world ruled by a scarcity mind-set. As Chairwoman Park starts making changes around the club, people’s positions get switched around: Austin, who is half-Korean, ends up elevated over Ashley, who has worked there longer. Does she deserve a better role more than the partner with whom she wants to have a baby? Lindsay, who had hoped to snag the job redecorating the club, gets summarily dismissed by Chairwoman Park, who jeeringly called her style “Colonial.” Should Josh be offended on her behalf, or is he right to be annoyed that he’s borne the brunt of their finances while Lindsay has sporadically worked? How do the couples’ ethnic backgrounds —Josh and Austin are both POC, Lindsay and Ashley are both white — affect how they relate to each other? And how can any relationship survive the crushing influence of both literal and figurative debt, especially the emotional labor of caring for someone who might no longer be the same person as when you met?

These are all gargantuan ideas Lee explores through exquisitely choreographed scenes that establish, via carefully crafted details and fully committed performances, what everyone has on the line. There’s a recurring visual throughout the season of ants marching forward, their destination uncertain but their movements rote, that is a little too tidy in its metaphor. But so much else, especially the mutating alliances and rivalries inside and between the millennial and Gen-Z couples, is compelling exactly because it resists easy judgments or simplistic readings. Each character has totally justified and totally unjustified reasons for resenting one another, and the sensation of absorbing those contrasting opinions is like being in a stuck bumper car, barraged and battered from all sides. You’ll be persuaded most by whoever’s pleading their case right then, until it’s time for someone else to relay their grievances and desires, then you’ll switch to their side. It’s intermittently unpleasant but unbelievably effective, and Lee delivers set piece after set piece that will make you double over with their queasy, knife-sharp ambiguity.

Those big swings work because the season’s cast all grasp the series’ constantly shifting tone and shape their performances around it. A hospital-set episode that’s like a surreal descent into Dante’s Inferno transforms Ashley from the series’ most unsympathetic, rudderless character into a woman who sees her future stolen from her by a system eager to punish its citizens for being poor. The mirrored looks of fury and guilt on Josh’s and Lindsay’s faces as they blame each other for a family tragedy is exceptional work from Isaac and Mulligan, whose characters want to draw blood from each other until someone else insults their bond, then they’re ride or die. And the season’s MVP is the mustachioed Melton, whose himbo performance is defined by the palpable loneliness exuding from his muscular body. Melton’s Austin starts as a baby leftist crying over a dead bee, then becomes torn between the authentic Korean cultural education Chairwoman Park claims to offer him and the increasingly ambitious Ashley, who wants to leverage Austin’s heritage for her own personal gain. Melton channels that indecision into a physicality that feels like a child being told to sit still and smiles that increasingly don’t reach his eyes. Austin can’t be himself because he’s willingly surrounded by people who won’t let him, and that’s a heartbreaking pattern on Beef, how often we trade parts of ourselves because we think we’ll be better off and rarely are.

This can all be grueling to watch, as the first season often was. And also like the first season, it can be outlandishly funny, with barbed observations that feel like Lee throwing punches willy-nilly in a bar fight. A neighbor complains to Josh about a “Hispanic” walking down the street and when he informs her that was him, she scoffs back, “You’re Greek” (a fun metatextual nod to Isaac’s “ethnically ambiguous” acting persona). Ashley embarrasses herself with a rambling attempt to compare the zero-to-ten pain scale with Letterboxd star ratings; Lindsay looks like a moron when she asks a lawyer for advice, then references talking to ChatGPT. Taken together, Beef seems to say all of these are representations of a culture so toxically individualistic and ambitious that its members can’t even fathom solidarity as an option to push back against a depraved ruling class. Everyone thinks their fortunes are just around the corner; everyone wants to be in the big club. It’s a Squid Game–esque idea and maybe it feels too titanic for Beef, a show that was once about a traffic incident at a home-improvement store. What Beef did so well in its first season, though, and does again here, is track how multifaceted our subjectivity is, and how our actions always have consequences we can’t quite anticipate, because everyone else has their own multifaceted subjectivity, too. All of us are alike and none of us are alike, and that fundamental truth about the human condition can apply to so much about how we choose to live. What if we realized our similarities could be used to better ourselves collectively? Why can’t we dream a shared dream that improves all of our circumstances? Beef’s answer isn’t necessarily a satisfying one, but it still gives you plenty to chew on.

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