Beef review: Netflix road rage series is one of the year's best

From the jump, we’re treated to the 'beef' that consumes the two fiery leads of Netflix's fittingly titled new series Beef.

Launching on Netflix this week, the A24-produced series is a riveting black dramedy that starts off as a road rage revenge tale, before swerving into meaty ruminations on generational trauma, class warfare, and the Asian-American immigrant experience.

Set in Los Angeles, Beef depicts the life-changing events that occur after a chance altercation between struggling handyman Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) and self-made entrepreneur Amy Lau (Ali Wong).

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We first meet Danny in total despair. Wracked with guilt over possibly playing a part in his parents’ loss of their motel, he’s trying to rack up the cash required to fly them back from Korea and retire in the US.

To do so, he hustles for odd jobs and shady schemes to keep his construction company afloat and support his slacker, crypto-addict kid brother Paul (Young Mazino). It’s a lot to juggle for a working class 30-something who’s barely keeping some pretty dark thoughts at bay.

He finally reaches his breaking point at a home improvement store car park, when after nearly backing his rusty truck into a shiny SUV, the unseen driver proceeds to barrage him with honks and a flip of the bird.

This declaration of war sparks a mad car chase through the neat streets of Calabasas, leaving demolished flowerbeds and disrupted suburbia in their trail. The SUV eventually speeds off, but not before Danny memorises the licence plate. Unwilling to move past his road rage, the luckless Danny feels the need for vengeance over his new nemesis — later revealed to be Amy.

On the surface, Amy should be happy with her lot in life. She lives in a lovely home, is married to the doting George (Joseph Lee), and is about to close the sale of her boutique houseplant business to culture vulture yuppie Jordan Forster (Maria Bello).

Like Danny though, Amy also feels the pressures of the world weighing her down. She grits through mother-in-law Fumi (Patti Yasutake) making regular quips at her expense. She’s the sole breadwinner because George wants to sculpt vases for a living, but clearly didn’t inherit his artist father’s talents. The massive payday will free her to spend more time with her precocious daughter Junie (Remy Holt), but she’s troubled by the gnawing realisation that marital bliss and the white picket fence won’t really make her happy.

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So when his truck almost collides with her SUV, she finally unravels to devastating effect, setting up a vendetta that escalates from petty pranks to something more mutually destructive than either — and everyone else in their lives, for that matter — had thought possible.

Their bitter enmity fuels them to only see in each other the symbol of everything wrong in their lives. It also gives them a purpose they sorely lacked during their midlife crises, finally being able to break free from the veneers they put up every day.

The downtrodden Danny often complains that he’s “sick of smiling”. Amy’s anger and helplessness only deepens whenever the annoyingly positive George insists on taking the high road, admitting that she “hates pretending that [she] doesn’t hate things”.

The episode titles — named after fragments of existentialist musings from Franz Kafka (“I Am A Cage”), Sylvia Plath (“I Am Inhibited By a Cry”), Werner Herzog (“The Birds Don’t Sing, They Screech in Pain”), Joseph Campbell (“The Rapture of Being Alive”), and more — offer minor glimpses into how elusive happiness is for Danny and Amy, even when they’re leading the scoreboard.

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We see them at their most vulnerable as the series progresses, each finding solace in confiding to strangers and silently lamenting their upbringings. Creator Lee Sung Jin, whose writing credits include Silicon Valley, Dave, and the cancelled-too-soon Tuca & Bertie (also starring Yeun and Wong), does a fantastic job highlighting Amy and Danny’s dark kinship by drawing distinct parallels between them.

Despite their different backgrounds — Amy is about to make millions from her venture and lives in an affluent neighbourhood, whereas Danny often resorts to scams and shares a tiny flat with Paul — they are a lot alike than either would want to admit. It leaves us wondering if their beef could’ve been squashed if they tried to hash it out from the very beginning, instead of bottling their feelings up like their parents before them.

Beef’s brilliance also owes a lot to Wong and Yeun, for they are marvellous in their portrayals of two stubborn but conflicted individuals. Though their characters become more unlikeable with each episode, they each evoke a pathos that comes from not knowing how to deal with their myriad issues and burdens.

It’s a career-best performance from Wong, who oscillates between forlorn and frantic whenever Amy’s calm facade breaks off into torrents of varying emotional degrees. Yeun, whose Danny is constantly put through the wringer, is exceptional as someone whose intentions are pure, but is way too reliant on taking unethical shortcuts to truly do right by his loved ones.

A strong supporting cast adds scope and weight to the damage our squabbling leads have caused, but there’s little doubt that Beef cooks best when Wong and Yeun share screen time.

Just like most Netflix dramas though, Beef suffers from being too long. Chaotic tonal shifts that border on unnecessary absurdism occur towards the series’ climax. Late flashback sequences add little to our protagonists’ stories, and B-plots with a few interesting side characters are left undercooked.

Read the Indiewire review: Ali Wong and Steven Yeun are knockouts in Netflix’s outsized A24 drama (6 min read)

Despite those slight shortcomings, the ten-episode series is a boldly original take on the oft-told aphorism: “life sucks”.

Unafraid to plunge into deeper depths to weave a tapestry of two damaged people desperately seeking salvation, Beef’s dedication to telling a warts-and-all story makes for some compelling viewing, and should rank high in many best-of lists by 2023’s end.

Beef is streaming on Netflix from 6 April.