Beef Season 2 Review: A Story We Needed, The Season We Didn’t

There's a different kind of sadness in watching a show - and a good one at that - knowing in your heart that had it not been a part of a series, reviewers everywhere would have been lapping it up. Worse still is when the original season is so good that it's difficult to actually live up to its standards.

In that sense, Beef Season 2 was a project doomed from the start. Almost anyone who remembered the feeling of seeing Danny and Amy’s all-consuming feud would have nothing but a checklist with which to compare the new season. The handful that would start the show with season 2, in that case, would be the only ones to truly enjoy Steven Yeung’s show for what it is: a thesis on the power of love.

Class Wars And Personal Vendettas

In a very White Lotus-ish move, the second season of beef brings in a new cast. On the blue corner are fiancés Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley and Charles Melton’s Austin, workers at the luxurious Monte Vista Point Country Club. On the red, we have the power couple, Lindsey (Carry Mulligan) and her husband Josh (Oscar Isaac), the general manager at the club. Lindsey and Josh’s marriage is anything but peaceful, and on a particularly ascerbic fight, when, in a fit of rage, Lindsey picks up Josh’s golf club in the heat of the moment, the two are recorded by Ashley. Austin and Ashley, meanwhile, have their own gripe with the managers: Ashley suffers from ovarian torsion, and as Austin convinces her, the system has f****d her up by denying her even a basic health insurance. 

While the two couple now embark on a game of shadows to use the video for good or get it deleted, a third couple comes into the picture, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung, the grandmother from Minari), the ruthless billionaire who’s set to be the new owner of the club, and her husband, the prominent plastic surgeon from Seoul, Dr. Kim (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho). 

Sure, Josh and Ashley are fighting it all out for every square inch they can get, but this is an eat-the-rich drama, remember? Our (very well-to-do) middle-class and lower-class leads have absolutely no chance when the 1% is out to get them, and by the final episode, their feud is just an attempt at surviving Chairwoman Park’s wrath in the best way they can.

To season the beef, there are little nods to Danny and Amy’s season throughout. Danny’s pissing scene from season 1 has horrifyingly worse follow-ups (plural, because it happens more than once). While it keeps you on your seat for a full episode, it doesn’t deliver the same payoff as it did in the first season. At one point, it almost feels like Yeun took the bare bones of the first season to create a framework for the second.

Compared to the first season, the Asian American representation, too, seems surprisingly absent (or more correctly, conveniently present). What made the first season stand out in 2023 was how it handled topics like the excruciating pressure to succeed and the lack of conversation around mental health among Asian families. Danny and Amy were just regular people like you and me, struggling with their own problems and forcing themselves to appear normal through it all. All it took for them was one bad day, and a single incident of road rage set off an insidious cycle of revenge and retribution.

This season, you have Asian actors (and some brilliant ones at that), but almost as a nod to the first one. Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim are like a foreign entity set out to crush the two families at the Monte Vista, but in reality, they could have been anyone, and it would not have mattered as much to the story.

What you do have, however, is a larger conversation about love, and what it means to love someone when the economy is out to roast you alive.

The Saving Grace: Love In An Era Of Unbridled Capitalism

Now, you could say that even this is a checklist from the previous season, in how love gives Beef season 2 it's uplifting, feel-good ending. But I'll disagree: love plays a much larger role this season, even more than before, if it's possible. 

If anything, the class war only brings out the love that the couples have (or don’t have) for each other. In a sort of a twisted common ground, all three start off in these very codependent relationships: Ashley hangs on to Austin to provide her with the emotional stability she didn’t have as a child; Josh and Lindsey don’t love each other, but are there for the image of it all, and Dr. Kim operates on patients despite having a trembling hand because he is terrified his wife will leave him one day for a better man. 

The interpersonal feuds test their relationship to the limits and wear out all the characters involved, but in the end, love that gives them the hope to go above and beyond, even forsake the fight. If anything, it's the antidote to the almost cancerous levels of greed that our characters display. It's love that things together couples when all is lost between them, and also love that helps them go beyond their basal instincts and set their partner free. And when blinding displays to money and power can’t make up for the hollow in our characters hearts, love becomes the solace for even the worst of people.

It’s a depressing message, maybe. But then, it’s a depressing world we live in, and if there’s a single solace, is it so wrong to cling to it?