Netflix’s Beef, the new A24 show starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, lets its stars be assholes as they feud across season 1 and its various twists.
The Netflix series Beef is a cataclysmic spiral of existential despair and self-destruction. It starts, however, with little more than a traffic altercation: Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) backs out of an LA parking lot in his crappy red truck and nearly hits a pristine white SUV. Horns are honked, words shouted, middle fingers extended. It’s the sort of conflict where the participants tend to go on with their lives once they’ve let off some steam.
But for Danny and the unseen SUV driver, there’s still quite a lot of steam to let off. Danny gives chase, weaving through red lights and stop signs while his adversary pelts his windshield with garbage. Once the confrontation is over and the SUV speeds away, we see that the driver is another Asian American: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a harried entrepreneur on the verge of selling her thriving business for a huge payday.
The characters in Beef are not well-intentioned victims of circumstance who learn some sort of lesson by the end. They are allowed to be horrible and selfish and petty in ways that we rarely see outside white-centered stories, and their behavior takes on a fascinating additional layer in the context of the Asian American identity that unites them even across divisions of class and culture.
In essence, the series is an extreme interpretation of something Amy’s touchy-feely husband George (Joseph Lee) says: You never know what the other person is going through. Danny is a struggling handyman living out of the motel his family once owned with his layabout brother Paul (Young Mazino). George is right, in a sense, that Amy and Danny are thinking of the other only as a target for their ire rather than as a distinct person with their own life and feelings. Of course, he’s also ignoring the fact that Danny tracked Amy down in the aftermath, cajoled his way into her home, and maliciously peed all over her bathroom.
Beef gives its Asian Americans room to be anything but reserved and polite. We watch the imperfect coping mechanisms they’ve developed, like masturbating with a gun or inhaling a distressing amount of Burger King. And then we see how, in painting one another as an unambiguous enemy, they find an outlet for the emotions they’ve spent so much of their lives holding in.
