Beef’s second season premieres April 16 on Netflix.
By Elazar Abrahams
Beef Season 2 is a near masterpiece, and some of the best television we are going to get this year. Episode after episode, the show is confidently made, ruthlessly examining human behavior.
As an anthology series, this season is unrelated to Ali Wong and Steven Yeun-led outing from 2023, instead resetting the board with a brand new story and cast. The inciting incident time around is deliciously small, just like the original: newly engaged coworkers Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton) witness an alarming fight between their boss Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Lindsay Crane-Martín (Carey Mulligan) at an exclusive country club. After they capture the outburst on video, the encounter detonates into a chain reaction of blackmailed favors, manipulations, and escalating cruelty.
Isaac and Mulligan’s characters have their own conflicts, and Spaeny and Melton’s have theirs too, each deliciously written. But the central “beef” is really between the two couples, the managers of this elite world and the employees who suddenly find themselves pulled into their mess, and then start pulling back. The story becomes a layered tale of class resentment, and the kind of passive aggression that becomes active the moment someone realizes they can hurt you.
What makes Beef so addictive is that it is constantly doing multiple things at once. It’s funny, dramatic, and oh so smart about the world. You feel the depth in each of the main players in each line of dialogue and how they move through rooms.
The performances are off the charts. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan are doing the elite level of acting that somehow gets audiences to care about unlikable characters. Beef is asking us to empathize with people who behave horribly behind closed doors (and often in public too), and it totally works.
The younger pair is just as well cast. Cailee Spaeny is a revelation here. Charles Melton is also excellent, and together they crackle. Their relationship becomes a pressure cooker, where their respective ambitions begin to step on each other, and the show is especially sharp when exploring their growing distrust but ultimate reliance on each other.
Beef captures the aggression that exists in all kinds of people, including the people you would least expect to be capable of it. It also captures the way “getting even” can become a spiritual mission. The show understands that revenge is rarely just about revenge. It’s about humiliation, about status, about not wanting to feel small, about not wanting to be the only person hurting.
If there’s any critique, it’s that the season’s setup and first two-thirds are stronger than the ending. The finale takes the characters to Korea, and while the show ties together its major storylines in a satisfying way, the hijinks get a little too over-the-top compared to the earlier psychological precision. That said, it doesn’t undo the experience.
What’s especially impressive is that this season made me more excited about Beef as a sustained anthology than I ever expected. I didn’t even love Season 1 the way many people did. Season 2, though, feels like proof of concept at the highest level. If the creators can keep the writing this sharp, the casting this strong, and the emotional cruelty this human, Beef could keep reinventing itself for a long time.
I give Beef Season 2 an A.
TV and City 