Danny tries to back out of a parking space. The driver of a passing SUV blocks him in and leans on the horn. That’s it. That’s the inciting incident. “Beef” is incandescent, but it’s sparked by the smallest moment. Both feel wronged. Both have had enough. Both are taking their lives out on the other. He gives chase in his truck and the pair wreck some curbs and flowerbeds on the way. The driver of the SUV gets away, but not before Danny memorizes the license plate.
His revenge is modest at first – a destructive prank. Amy’s the driver of that SUV and she returns the favor. Each humiliates the other because both feel stuck in traps and finally have someone they can make suffer for it. Amy has been in a constant orbit of trying to sell her business for two years so she can spend more time with her daughter and her human oof of a husband George. Danny works less and less frequently as a contractor because he’s losing clients. They both feel so close to achieving what they want even as the distance to it grows and grows.
Ali Wong’s performance as Amy is like seeing a building being demolished, or a bridge collapsing. It’s that frame in slow motion when you first see the rupture, that first hint of shock wave seeping through the structure. Each layer of damping that’s built to absorb enormous stresses is overloaded in cascade. The architecture of that building, or bridge, or human stands as if it were still whole for just an instant, cracked through but still the shape of what it had been before the pieces tumble apart.
Steven Yeun as Danny bides his time, a tense wire who waffles between dangerous and comedic until a moment comes where he just shatters you, where he makes you feel what it is to be desperate, the pain of being out of control. I live for moments when actors flip a switch and wrap you up in what a character’s feeling.
For a dark comedy about two people escalating their vengeance against each other, “Beef” is an enormously empathetic show. It grasps the rage Amy and Danny inhabit so readily is a product of trauma, of having no one who truly listens to them or values them as having something to say, and of being trapped in a system where success is something someone else can always take away on a whim.
There are countless moments in “Beef” where characters discover kindness and connection in unexpected places, but the world we live in often doesn’t give the space for these. They feel pressured to close off to these moments and leave them in their wake. That kindness won’t earn money or impress a future boss or give them an advantage. Perhaps it’s a lure and even if it isn’t, is it worth the risk? Kindness is often replied to with a faux niceness that others are more prone to expect, that they feel more comfortable with because it’s predictable and requires no commitment.
When kindness is allowed it’s hidden, disguised, masked. It’s realized behind closed doors, treated shamefully, and the characters who receive it are conditioned to think they aren’t deserving of it. Rather than accept it, they respond aggressively, or see the endgame as taking advantage of it before it can take advantage of them.
This may make “Beef” sound like an endurance test, but it’s really an exciting, vivacious, and compassionate show…just one with a searingly dark sense of humor. Some shows have tension that lurks under the surface, some have tension that jumps out at you. The tension in “Beef” leans over your shoulder and asks you what you’re doing. It chills with you. The tension builds a nest in you that becomes a comfort and a thrill, which in itself reveals just how eerily accurate its themes of normalization are.
For one example, Maria Bello plays Jordan. She’s one of the most hateable characters in recent memory. She stretches out the process of buying Amy’s company. It becomes quickly apparent that this is an excuse to tour the ethnicities of Amy and her husband, to use her wealth and privilege so they can confirm for her ego how worldly she is. At the same time, we see Amy assimilated more and more into the nature of Jordan, rejecting her own desires for measures of success she was never interested in. Many people of color can immediately recognize these moments of being used as someone’s accessory, to have to yes-man whatever casual racism comes out of someone’s mouth. We can also recognize how scary it is to one day realize that to survive it we’ve started to normalize it, build a comfort for it. Thankfully, the joke is never Amy – it’s the absurdity of Jordan.
That’s something crucial to highlight. “Beef” is absurdist and satirical, but it feels grounded and genuine because it brings everything back to core realities. Each of its ridiculous situations and jokes is something that’s very recognizable, that real people put up with in real life every day.
“Beef” makes me think of a number of series that have bordered the same territory. Last year’s “The Bear” was another conflict-heavy series with moments of absurdity. It told the story of a chaotic Chicago Italian beef shop under new management, and every moment felt escalated. I had to watch the episodes slowly over time because they rested a finger on the trigger of my fight-or-flight response. After watching, I felt like I was already in the middle of a fight with someone. I had to make sure to take a few minutes for myself to cycle out of it, or to watch something calming or funny afterward. That’s a brilliant accomplishment on the show’s part, and a more extreme example of the way a show like this might usually make us feel. They escalate us even as we watch.
A show with the structure and themes of “Beef” should do the same, but “Beef” tacks in the opposite direction. It doesn’t provoke, it laughs at the ridiculousness of those escalated moments even as it peels back what they respond to.
“Killing It” would be a good companion piece to “Beef”. They both traffic in absurdism as a way of highlighting the crushing weight of terminal capitalism. They both find people lashing out as a response to inordinate pressures, but also identify what to empathize with in terms of why they do.
Yet the closest comparison I can think of is an incredibly strange one. “Beef” actually reminds me a lot of “Malcolm in the Middle” – not because they’re doing the same thing or have the same goals or have a remotely similar pace, but because both shows can juggle darkly comic banter in the foreground while a longer absurdist sketch evolves organically in the background, all bridging the pieces of larger conceptual jokes together that can still sustain sight gags and prat falls. There’s an astonishing mastery of multiple modes of comedy, and “Beef” pulls this off in something that still evolves and feels like a drama. The approach is nothing new, but being this good at it and pulling this much humanity and accessibility out of it is awe-striking.
Every episode ends with what you could call a climax or cliffhanger, but would be more accurately described as a moment of wreck. Dread at what comes next is paired with not being able to look away. You need to know what happens. It’s a fun outlet for our need to rubberneck, but it’s also an extraordinarily compassionate one. At once, we would never act like these ridiculous characters yet we understand completely how close we are to being them. Those two things don’t disagree. They exist in everyone. It’s just a matter of how wearing the day’s been and how honest we’re being with ourselves. It’s a matter of how close that shock wave is to the surface, of whether we’ve maintained all that damping that’s meant to absorb the stress, of whether the architecture of who we are is supported well enough by who and what’s around us to help us endure.
“Beef” isn’t a masterpiece. It’s the shape of a masterpiece cracked through, before the pieces tumble apart. It’s the masterpiece demolished, picked apart, laughed at, understood, sometimes rejected because we understand it too much. It has to be as funny as it is because if it weren’t, we’d lash out and refuse to accept what it reflects in us. It’s our masterpieces put back together like dinosaurs. “Look what we can do. Look at how large and terrifying it is. Look at how we took over. How large and terrifying we must be. How dare someone act like we aren’t? How dare they block me in? How dare they honk their horn? They don’t know who they’re messing with. They don’t know how large and terrifying I am. They have to be reminded. It’s my duty to remind them.” That’s it. That’s the inciting incident. “Beef” is a landscape.
You can watch “Beef” on Netflix.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 