‘Beef’ Season 2 is Puzzling
Charles Melton, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, and Cailee Spaeny in Beef Season 2 | Credit: Netflix
When one couple witnesses another couple fighting, they seek to use that knowledge for their own gain… with some wild results!
The first season of Beef absolutely won me over. Though I was very late to watching it, it absolutely lived up to the hype. And after watching such a fantastic first season, I was thrilled to dive back into this world with a new cast of characters in this anthology show.
Beef season two is an interesting ride, but falters in the second half of the season. It starts off very strong, especially in adopting a tone that was so different than the first season. We are taken into a country club, which is a very different world. This system requires you to trade favors, speak passive-aggressively, manipulate those around you, and, occasionally, engage in some light blackmail.
The internal politics of the club are so fun to watch, and these moments of passive aggressiveness are written perfectly. This is such an interesting departure from the first season, which featured so much overt anger. Instead, this season seems focused on the rage that comes out differently and the systems that seek to keep people in their predetermined places.
Everyone has a role to play in the country club, but what happens when someone breaks out of that role?
Cailee Spaeny in Beef Season 2 | Credit: Netflix
Beef season two features a fantastic cast who all deliver excellent performances throughout the season. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan are fantastic as the older couple who have been married for a while and know how to navigate this world of manipulation and deceit with ease. These two actors are perfectly paired together and are entertaining to watch, especially in their most destructive moments.
Opposite them are Cailey Spainey and Charles Melton as Ashley and Austin, the so-in-love, recently engaged couple who haven’t experienced much of the real world yet. They both work entry-level jobs at the country club and insert themselves into this world of manipulation, not knowing what they are getting into.
We also meet a third couple, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and her husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), who have a different relationship (and a very different income level) than the other two couples. Though we spend the least amount of time with these two characters, they have an outsized impact on the plot—and cause maximum chaos at some pivotal moments.
These three couples clash and collide with each other in many different ways throughout the course of the season. We see the manipulation that each person employs on the other and how far people will go in order to get what they want. And their various levels of wealth make for some really interesting commentary on the class system that exists in our world today.
Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac in Beef Season 2 | Credit: Netflix
While Beef season two starts off strong, immersing the audience in this passive-aggressive world, it falters toward the end of the season. What starts as subtle and interesting manipulation explodes into outright aggression, with increasingly unbelievable situations.
While this change from covert to overt aggression could be interesting to explore, the characters in this season aren’t consistent. From episode to episode, especially toward the end of the season, I felt as though I was watching different characters than I thought I knew. It didn’t seem like the character was changing from what I had grown to expect; instead, it seemed as though the writers forgot who this person was, but continued on writing anyway.
The season ends incredibly dramatically. While I like some of the choices that are made, for the most part the season left me confused. There were so many over-the-top shifts made by certain characters within the finale episode alone that I found confusing.
While many good things happen in this season, I think it was too ambitious. Going from two main characters to four, from one state to a globe-trotting adventure, and going from ten episodes to eight meant that this story was a little less cohesive. It also means that certain moments or consequential character choices weren’t given the space to breathe as they could have.
Season two of Beef doesn’t have the same impact as the first season, but I would still watch another season of the show if it’s renewed for a third season. Lee Sung Jin has such interesting ideas that I can’t wait to see what he dreams up next.