‘Beef’ Season 2 Review: Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac in Netflix Smash

The philosopher Biggie Smalls once pondered the nature of dangerously escalating rivalries.

In a song of the same name, Biggie asked, “What’s beef?”

His answers included the straightforward “Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep,” and the playful “Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in I-C-U.”

Christopher Wallace passed away, likely a victim of a beef, long before the rise of the limited series, so Lee Sung Jin had the exploratory lane all to himself when he released the eight-episode bleak comedy Beef back in 2023. The series, about the unforeseen consequences erupting from a relatively minor instance of road rage, dominated the Emmys and eventually was picked up for a second season, transitioning from limited series to anthology and reframing Biggie’s question as: “What’s Beef?” Or, put a different way, what is the Beef brand? And could a second season, sans the extraordinary talents of Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, deliver a story and themes in keeping with that brand, without sullying what was so deviously tricky about the original series and its tone?

The answer, for the most part, is “Yes.” The second season of Beef can’t reproduce the sneak-up-on-you brilliance of the first, but without many direct connections this eight-episode story feels very much of a piece.

Once again, Jin has big ideas to play with and trenchant aspects of contemporary American culture to pick apart and, once again, he has assembled an exceptional cast in service of a story that begins tightly contained and spins wildly and intentionally out of control.

It’s possible that Jin actually has too much on his mind this time around, layering the central conflict with generational, economic and cultural divides, alternatingly poking fun and staring in jaw-agape horror at the modern condition in ways that don’t always come together. But if the thing that keeps season two of Beef from equalling its predecessor is an excess of ambition, I have no beef with that.

This time around, our featured characters — Beef doesn’t have traditional antagonists and protagonists, since its core concern is that niceties like situational ethics and morality are a fungible construct — are a pair of couples, separated in age by little over a decade but in status by a seemingly greater distance.

Josh (Oscar Isaac) is the general manager at the Monte Vista Point Country Club near tony Montecito, north of Los Angeles. His job is to be accommodating to the club’s wealthy clientele, embodied by William Fichtner’s Troy, a wildly rich music industry mogul (or something to that effect). Josh is married to Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), an upper-crust Brit who has all the external status markers that Josh lacks, but perhaps not his obsequious gifts or ambition. They’ve been talking for years about starting an upscale bed-and-breakfast, without evident progress, one of several factors adding volatility to their marriage.

At the other end of the volatility spectrum are newly engaged 20-somethings Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), two of Josh’s underlings at the club. Ashley is a beverage cart girl on the club’s golf course, while Austin works part-time as a trainer. Austin and Ashley don’t have much money, but they’re so deeply in love that they never fight.

On the night of a fundraiser at the club, Josh forgets his wallet and Austin and Ashley are tasked with returning it, walking in at the end of a heated argument between Josh and Lindsay — a fight that reaches a violent climax that Ashley films on her phone. Ashley and Austin experience this blow-up out of context, and the video captures it with even less context. But the younger couple sees an opportunity for professional advancement, to score a win in a game they’re convinced is rigged against them.

But in this clash of haves and have-nots, are Josh and Lindsay really among the privileged? Their position is made precarious by the arrival of Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), Korean billionaire and the club’s new owner. Park puts new pressure on Josh in part because of the pressure she herself is feeling back in Seoul under circumstances related to her plastic surgeon husband (Song Kang-ho, wonderful if very underused).

Soon, a cycle of blackmail, extortion and fraud ensues, borne of desperate grasping for power and a potentially fatal lack of empathy on all fronts. Meanwhile, the lines between exploiter and exploited, powerful and powerless, hero and villain blur in ways that are sometimes satirical, sometimes sad and occasionally thrilling.

There’s a lot happening in the second season of Beef. Although the episode count has gone from 10 to eight, the length of episodes have expanded from under 40 minutes to as many as 54 minutes for the season two finale, which has a relatively epic scale but gets bogged down in at least three different monologues from characters telling viewers what the season was about.

Though Beef isn’t exclusively a dark comedy, its comic beats thrive with a tighter pace and stricter focus. This best two episodes (directed by Jin and Kitao Sakurai) come midseason — a hilarious nightmare in a hospital emergency room and a differently hilarious nightmare of a search for a missing dachshund named Burberry — and they’re the two shortest episodes of the season, dedicated primarily to tracking just one of the couples on a single misadventure. One takes a scathing look at the absurdities of the American healthcare industry, while the other reinforces the season’s nature-out-of-balance themes. They’re both fast-moving and dazzlingly absurd.

Those two standout episodes are also largely separated from the country club settling, which too often opens the door for slightly superficial jabs at the club’s vapid members. They’re a perfectly worthy target, but one that invites inevitable comparisons to The White Lotus (and allows for some very odd and very unexpected celebrity cameos that I won’t spoil here).

It’s possible that Beef is actually parodying The White Lotus at times, especially with the younger couple, a high-school dropout and a former Arizona State football star — Gen Z strivers who know the buzzwords of capitalist critique (“It’s unfair. Globally. There’s gotta be a redistribution of the wealth,” Austin declares, apropos of nothing) without any substance to back it up. They simply see an opportunity to grab for the brass ring, ready to do whatever it takes to get what they believe they deserve, until they discover what “whatever it takes” means. Or maybe until they discover what Reddit tells them it means, because Beef is particularly harsh toward the online proxies for nourishing social relationships — uncaring cam girls, hollow DM flirtations and help forums that only make things worse.

As was the case in the first season, Beef is a machine driven by unintended consequences, some violent, some scatological and all designed to crush the souls of characters who might not have souls to begin with.

Even more than the first season, this round of Beef makes it difficult to root for anybody. I felt a real pendulum the first time around between Danny (Yeun) and Amy (Wong), each doing the wrong things for ostensibly justifiable reasons. Here, it’s a struggle between two flawed couples, easier to pity, if only because they don’t realize that there’s nothing the aristocracy wants more than for them to fight to the death rather than pay attention to who actually has the power.

Performance-wise, I sided with the younger couple. I thought Riverdale veteran Melton’s May December performance was more tantalizing promise than talent confirmed, but there’s evidence of comic genius in how soulfully silly he makes Austin. Spaeny’s Ashley is half Lady Macbeth, half innocent child, fully oblivious to how her ambitions are changing her and changing a relationship that seems nourishing as long as it’s based on a shared appreciation of Hot Pockets. Going back to Priscilla, I admire how Spaeny uses the height disparity with her leading men as a source of both humor and sweetness.

The show perhaps has sympathy for Ashley and Austin because they don’t know any better. Lindsay and Josh have been together long enough to realize their shared toxicity, but they’re giddy when their new rivals given them fresh targets for their simmering resentments. Mulligan delivers lacerating fragility, while Isaac turns Josh’s accommodating nature into a pathology, but both characters are littered with backstory details that Beef leaves hanging. It’s a plot point that these are both mixed-race couples that are rarely forced to confront their differences, but the show does better with Austin’s confrontation of his Korean roots than with Josh’s Cuban background.

Youn, whose presence reminds me that I’m still mad about Apple’s treatment of Pachinko, projects kindness with a glint of scheming malevolence, and I really wish the series had given us more of Youn and Song together. Several other characters on the Korean side of the story, which grows in importance as the finale approaches, could have used a little more depth — including Seoyeon Jang’s overqualified translator Eunice and rapper BM’s Woosh, a tennis instructor with aspirations of his own.

As was the case in the first season as well, the finale escalates to a place of thrilling zaniness, with a little less ultimate emotional gravitas this time around. The concluding punch isn’t as potent, but the show left me with so much to think about and so many details to be amused by that I hope Lee Sung Jin has the opportunity to show us what else Beef can be.