'Beef' is, hands down, the best TV show of the year
In season 2 of the Netflix series, creator Lee Sung Jin lands on a grand theory of modern love
YOU KNOW THAT final moment in The Graduate? Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in the back of a city bus, staring into the void. The now-iconic needle-drop, “The Sound of Silence,” which would practically become the theme song for existential dread. I’m going to die still married to this person, and nothing else matters, does it? Got it? Now stretch that sensation over eight episodes of TV. That’s Beef season 2.
In 2024, season 1 of Lee Sung Jin’s Netflix dramedy dominated the Emmys. It followed two road-ragers named Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun), who beef their way into improbably falling in love by the end of the series. After deliberating if, when, and how to continue the show—damn near sweeping an awards season will do that—Lee decided to make Beef into an anthology series. But his sophomore effort is a different beast entirely.
In Season 2, the beef is between two sets of lovers, played by Oscar Isaac, and Carey Mulligan alongside Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton. The former pair are a married, elder-millennial couple who seem one more side-eye away from divorce. They gave up their dreams to run a country club and now their makeshift life is falling apart. The latter pair are broke Gen-Zers who consider DiGiorno a celebratory feast, but are very much in the honeymoon phase. The hopeful fiancés work at the club performing menial tasks like collecting golf balls and driving drink caddies. Later on, we meet a baby-boomer couple set to buy the club, Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim, played by Korean cinema legends Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho, respectively.
The inciting beef is satisfyingly juicy: The younger pair stumble upon the wealthy couple’s home, only to see them nearly coming to blows through their window. Video of the incident quickly becomes blackmail material, which inspires a whole bunch of antics, including a madcap penultimate episode set in South Korea. But that’s not what makes Beef season 2 this year’s best TV show so far. (Which I don’t say lightly—don’t look now, but Lee just swiped the heavyweight belt from The Pitt.)
It’s that this season’s titular beef isn’t the conflict between the two couples. They do beef. But it’s the conflict between Josh (Isaac) and Lindsay (Mulligan)—and, yes, the two lovebirds, Ashley (Spaney) and Austin (Melton), that really stand out. Instead of pulling lovers together, as Lee does in season 1, he spends most of the second season driving them apart. Their trust is destroyed, and one lie snowballs into another. Then, somewhere along the way, Lee lands at a grand theory of modern love—and it’s quietly revolutionary.
First of all: Lee is far from the first creative to close-read relationships in the dating-app era. Materialists explored why relationships have skewed, well, more material. The New York Times column “Modern Love”—and its Prime Video adaptation—dug for the million little ways a relationship can go right and wrong, or change a life for better or worse. Similarly, as Lee teases out each pair’s dynamics in the first half of the season. he cleverly leads you to believe that Beef season 2 will examine why, exactly, each age bracket really ought to secure a prenup. Instead, he swerves.
Nothing breaks down the way our characters predict. As the chaos builds, the junior couple begins to fracture when Austin develops a wandering eye. Later, Lee captures a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that tells you everything you need to know from his childhood. Meanwhile, Ashley’s Gen-Z stare masks a heartbreaking medical crisis involving her ability to conceive. Same goes for the couple they feud with. The douchey Josh suffers from a Hot Chip-themed middle-age crisis, which morphs into a tale of grief and repression. His wife, Lindsay, spends most of her time dunking on Josh and searching for a way out, but Lee pivots her story into perhaps the most resonant of his work across both seasons. The oldest couple? Let’s just call them an amalgamation of the first two for now, because you need to experience the South Korea episode for yourself.
What makes Beef season 2 so damn genius, is that Lee doesn’t try to drum up some new, sign-of-the-times reason why love is broken nowadays. Beef‘s three couples fight about all the shit you and your significant other beef about: money, family, children. Every generation of Americans buckles under the weight of capitalism, even when they think they’re profiting from it. Trauma, family-induced or otherwise, isn’t exactly something that was born in the 21st century. And I don’t need to tell you that kids have altered the course of a relationship or two.
More often than not, it feels like Lee is saying: How does anyone have a perfectly functioning relationship when all of this shit is at play? Is anyone actually happy? Well, they don’t. And they aren’t. So, he eventually lands on his own theory of modern love: The grass isn’t greener, everybody’s with the wrong person, and we’re just plain fucked. And that’s okay.
I won’t spoil Beef‘s ending here, but you’ll see that there’s freedom in that. Something led us to the person we wake up next to every morning. Maybe we’re all simply a little bit unhappy with our partner because that’s life. If you can bring yourself to accept that, you might just find yourself cracking a smile in the back of that bus. Unlike Hoffman’s, yours will last.
This article originally appeared in Esquire US.
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