As far as road rage goes, the outburst that sets off the rivalry in the wickedly loopy comic drama “Beef” is downright piddling. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman in Los Angeles, attempts to pull his beater pickup truck out of a hardware-store parking lot, when he’s met by an obnoxiously long honk from a gleaming white Mercedes S.U.V., then a middle finger thrust out the window. Danny is in a foul enough mood that he gives chase to the other driver, Amy Lau (Ali Wong). After the pursuit leaves him unsatisfied, he decides to slowly insinuate himself into her home, even her family, to wreak chaos. His choice of target proves unfortunate; Amy is even more desperate for a sense of control, and thus for revenge.
Yet the most gratifying reveals in the ten-part Netflix series aren’t the wild escalations of the central pair but their rich psychological shadings. When Danny and Amy arrive at their respective homes after their encounter, neither can get out the full story about what happened. Danny, recounting the incident to his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), in the cramped apartment that they share, brags that he “scared the shit out of that motherfucker,” in a bit of masculine bravado that bears little resemblance to the truth. Amy, speaking to her woo-woo husband, George (Joseph Lee), can barely even begin to tell him about the confrontation before he shuts her down: “You’ve got to start focussing on the positive.” He’s a genial stay-at-home dad (with, perhaps, the world’s most beautiful sweater collection) and the coddled son of a famous artist, while she’s the overworked founder and aspirational face of a buzzy plant business she’s on the verge of selling for millions—and the one resentfully funding the couple’s bougie Calabasas life style. But the chasm between husband and wife is never wider than when George tells Amy, “Anger is just a transitory state of consciousness.” Amy and Danny accidentally uncork something in each other, and it’s a race to see whether they can do more harm to themselves or to the other.
“Beef” makes it both relevant and not that Danny and Amy are Asian American. As the season progresses, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, stresses that his dual protagonists are especially damaged, beset by depression and likely something else: a “void” in their bodies, the characters agree, that feels “empty but solid.” But they also belong to a group—in Amy’s case, two groups—whose members have been socialized to believe that their value lies in their willingness to accommodate, to fit in, to oblige. Now, by having a stranger to fuck with, they’ve stumbled upon a seemingly safe outlet for their most antisocial impulses. The joke’s on them: when Amy catfishes Paul (using thirst traps from her young, white female employee’s Instagram), and when Danny befriends George (by posing as “Zane,” a fellow-cyclist), the pitiful hotheads find themselves confiding in their marks what they cannot express to their loved ones.
The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. The soul-crushing interactions between Amy and the potential buyer of her business, Jordan (a bitch-perfect Maria Bello), are spectacularly cringey; a collector of artifacts from various cultures, Jordan treats Amy like another souvenir, a consumable affirmation of a pleasing stereotype. “You have this serene, Zen Buddhist thing,” Jordan airily tells Amy, who might be the first character I’ve ever seen masturbate with what turns out to be a Chekhov’s gun. Later, in couples counselling, Amy says that her Midwestern Chinese-immigrant father and her Vietnamese-refugee mother didn’t exactly model healthy emotional expression. She’s worried that she’s ill-equipped to parent her agitated young daughter, who acts out by picking at her skin and hitting a teacher. On a visit to her childhood home, Amy laments that she’s filled with “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” her—though “Beef” smartly leaves open the possibility that Amy may be deflecting the blame for her personality flaws onto her upbringing. Either way, the story line feels like a confident step toward Asian American pop culture’s maturation. Unlike the hallmarks of Asian Americana (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Beef” is less interested in dwelling on the cultural clashes that have led to the dislocation of the second generation than in exploring how that generation can raise their children without passing on all the hangups and traumas from their formative years.
Amy doesn’t get much support from her mother-in-law, the outwardly colorful but patrician-cold Fumi (an excellent Patti Yasutake), who indulges her grown son while making demands on Amy. The two women are vividly written, and Wong is fantastic in her first leading dramatic role. But “Beef” is, at its heart, a study of male loneliness—a theme that, while bog-standard in prestige television, finds renewed urgency when couched in an Asian American context. The fraternal breakdown between Danny and Paul is a small tragedy all its own. As the elder brother—traditionally, a position of authority in Korean families—Danny is too caught up in being his brother’s keeper to let Paul grow into his own person. Danny’s insecurities, which are intensified by his ineptness at his job, lead him to constantly puff himself up, driving away his brother. Paul’s withdrawal prompts Danny to turn toward their scuzzy cousin Isaac (David Choe, the celebrity muralist), a recent parolee whose scams cost Danny and Paul’s parents their family business. A character worthy of “The Sopranos,” Isaac is a bully and a charmer, as well as an exemplar of the way that tribal loyalties make victims more vulnerable to predators among their own kind. He bemoans that not even his family wants to spend time with him, and his pleas for companionship initially suggest that he may be the only dude around who’s man enough to lay bare his emotional needs. But Isaac seemingly can’t help wringing out anyone who happens to get too close.
Around the season’s halfway point, I began excitedly telling friends that I’d never seen a more Korean American show. (Not that there’s a lot of competition.) Konglish peppers the scenes between the Chos, as do Koreatown staples like musical rice cookers, space-age massage chairs, and the singsongy ringtone of the Korean messaging app KakaoTalk. The series takes an I.Y.K.Y.K. approach to many of these cultural details: if you know, you know. Among the biographical tidbits that Lee borrows from Wong and Yeun’s lives are the latter’s experience in Korean American church bands. Yeun, who plays against type, has a great voice, along with puckish comic timing. I laughingly winced at Danny’s disbelief that Amy, an uppity creative type, isn’t married to a white guy, and guffawed at Isaac’s marvellously specific reflections on his petless childhood: “Korean kids, you couldn’t ask for that kind of stuff back then. Like, that happened after 1990.” But the series’ most notable feat of representation is its centering of the mental-health struggles of Asian Americans. Amy’s concern that she’s sacrificed too much for her accomplishments and Danny’s frustration that his efforts have yielded him none lead them to the same place: a profound self-loathing that leaves them in existential terror of their true selves emerging into view.
The layers of repressed despair shaken loose by Amy and Danny’s feud are so precisely crafted that “Beef” can’t help but disappoint when, toward the season’s end, the stakes are raised to the melodrama of cinematic violence. It feels like a loss of assurance in the series’ métier—an identity crisis at odds with the exceptional delicateness of what came before it. Another sharp swerve, to hallucinogen-inspired introspection, strains the show’s already worn tonal elasticity. Like most onscreen drug trips, this one’s only fitfully entertaining, steering us toward a destination that seems more preordained than earned. In a series with such a clear-eyed view of human darkness, the eleventh-hour fuzzies aren’t given enough time for the warmth to sink in. ♦
