Three years after season one premiered back in 2023, the Netflix anthology show Beef is back with a new season, highlighting another relatively small story of everyday people who have a chance encounter and quickly find themselves, well, beefing.
Season two stars Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as an established couple who run an elite country club in California, as well as Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton as a younger couple who work around the club. When these four cross paths one night and one ends up with footage of a fight between the other that spiraled out of control and got physical, blackmail, power grabs, and jealousy follow.
Watching Beef, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another popular anthology series that uses intimate character studies to show larger trends of the modern world in HBO’s The White Lotus. Both The White Lotus and Beef have star-studded casts, depict the ugliness of everyday life and use black comedy to depict the many ways that seemingly ordinary people can find themselves obsessed with a neighbor, a co-worker, or acquaintance.
Season two of Beef uses the setting of an elite country club to show exorbitant wealth in America, as well as the strivers who are desperate to cut off a piece of the American dream for themselves, no matter what sacrifices they need to make along the way. Led by star turns by all four members of the main cast, Beef season two builds upon the stellar first season and proves that creator Lee Sung Jin’s show has the writing, the direction, and the vision to continue mining black comedy and tense drama out of little interactions that go south in a hurry.
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