‘Beef’ Season 2 Plan Revealed
Beef is one of the best Netflix shows in recent memory. The show takes a very simple premise and expands on it to create a complex character study of two people from different backgrounds mired in their own existential crises. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are the stars of Beef’s first season, but its showrunner Lee Sung Jin already has ideas for where the series could go with different people in the spotlight.
‘Beef’ is a darkly delicious dramedy about miserable people
Beef ignites when Danny Cho (Yeun) nearly gets in a car accident with Amy Lau (Wong) in the parking lot of a home improvement store. For reasons the characters spend most of the season trying to unpack, the situation escalates into an intense road rage incident that neither party can move on from.
Danny and Amy are living completely opposing lives. He is a struggling contractor attempting to level up with his crypto-loving brother Paul (Young Mazino) with a faraway dream of buying back his parent’s old business. She’s the proprietor of a successful plant-selling business on the brink of a massive sale with a rich stay-at-home husband (Joseph Lee). Despite their economic disparities, the incident shows that Danny and Amy both feel trapped and resentful at the state of their lives.
Beef explores their struggles and inability to find fulfillment while also making room for subversive jokes about capitalism, relationships, and general life in the 21st century.
The show’s creator knows what he would do with additional seasons
The first season of Beef was presented as a miniseries and reaches a fitting conclusion for Danny and Amy, but Lee has an outline of what a second season could be about.
He explained to Elle that the show was pitched as an anthology, meaning that we’ve probably seen the last of Yeun and Wong’s characters. “Cards on the table, we did pitch this show as a limited anthology, so there is sort of a close-ended-ness to the story [of Danny and Amy],” Lee said. “But, if given the opportunity, of course, I’d love to explore them further, because Danny and Amy, I love those characters. But yeah, by design, though, this a close-ended narrative.”
The upside of an anthology is that you can bring the show back in any form the creator sees fit. Lee went on to say that his pitch also included “multiple other beefs and other character types to explore” in future episodes if Netflix renews the project. The White Lotus and the American Horror Story franchise show that this format can be incredibly fruitful in the right hands.
‘Beef’ is hailed as one of the best shows of 2023
Beef is a superb show in the eyes of nearly everyone who’s watched it, earning a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The performances from the entire cast are receiving acclaim, but Yeun and Wong have understandably earned the most praise. Yeun’s excellence as an actor is unsurprising. His roles in Burning, Minari, and Nope showed that Yeun is a great actor capable of portraying tonally complex characters with ease.
Wong’s star turn as Amy is more noteworthy, both for the viewers and creators of Beef. (Lee told The Hollywood Reporter that he originally conceived of Amy’s character as a “Stanley Tucci type”.) Dramatic acting is a new direction for her career. Wong’s worked as a comedian and writer since the mid-2000s and ascended in the minds of many thanks to her trio of Netflix specials (Baby Cobra, Hard Knock Wife, and Don Wong), Always Be My Maybe, and her voice work in Tuca & Bertie. Wong first displayed more serious chops in the shortlived adaptation of the comic book Paper Girls for Amazon Prime, but Beef represents a new breakthrough.
Despite all of the great reviews of the show, the reputation of Beef does have a darker side. The casting of David Choe, who plays Danny’s sketchy cousin Isaac, has become controversial after his recounting of a disturbing sexual encounter in 2014 resurfaced. Choe used to co-host a podcast with porn star Asa Akira and in one episode, he told a story about coercing a masseuse to perform oral sex on him. While describing this anecdote, Choe refers to himself as a “successful rapist” before downgrading to “rapey behavior” later on.
Choe has since claimed that he made up the incident, apologized multiple times, and chalked it all up to his struggles with mental illness, but for some, this show of contrition is not convincing enough to not ask questions of Beef’s creators and the studios behind the series about why they saw fit to cast Choe in the first place.
