Mmm BEEF, but hold the veggies
Ali Wong is Amy Lau, in Netflix’s BEEF.
Life breezes by, it turns out, like a fastball in the spring when one isn’t writing. I have made the admission that I lead a less than exemplary life. I pay for a handful of subscriptions I barely use, I purchase books the seasons laminate with dust, I worry about the happiness and well-being of professional athletes more than I do the happiness and well-being of friends and family. So, caught in a state of perpetual existential transit, I am doing something about my shit.
I’m watching Seinfeld again, and loving it more than I did as an unemployed creative person in his early 20s. I’m watching a lot of baseball, so maybe, actually, I’m not doing an awful lot about my shit. I’m shutting down this website, so I can set up another one. I’m trying to have more opinions about art. I’m trying to eat better, call it a night at 11, listen to classical music as some impassioned liberal thinkpiece fact-checks me into reluctant sleep. I’m trying to look past the elements in people that make them covid-deniers, “look ha ha ha, we made it, didn’t we,” anti-choice fundamentalists, crisis-of-masculinity prophets, and so on, and just ‘consume’ people the way I do characters in books whose spines I let the seasons laminate with dust. I’m just trying to lay low. Avoid meaningless beef.
Beef, a Netflix series, collects mishaps and misunderstandings with which to season seemingly meaningless beef — then it works backwards here and there, though sometimes sideways, to establish why its participants keep doubling down. Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is a boss bish about to cash out on a lucrative, vibes-based plant business; Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) is a construction worker that’s trying, unsuccessfully, to return an inordinately large number of George Foreman grills. Their cars almost collide in the parking lot of a department store. There is honking, there are middle fingers, there is a chase scene, and then there is some ill-advised Googling. I committed my Easter weekend to Beef because it has been commissioned by A24, who perhaps need to invest in 1.5 camp horrors less each year, so I can dare to describe their outfit as the HBO of cinema. (I trust them; just not with my entire life.) I understand what the transaction is here, with Beef. I am signing up for cliff-hangers at the end of half-hour setpieces, instigated by oopsies with hilarious, cringey or mostly devastating consequences; I’ll gladly hand Netflix the double thumbs-up it needs to distinguish my liking the show from loving it.
Those setpieces are meant to look and feel natural. Instead of force-feeding you Asian culture, piously or painstakingly breaking down “what stuff means,” Beef piles several suburban disasters atop one another; purposely uses planet-fucked Californian light to illuminate Asian skin; and then motherland food, mysticisms, and I think some Korean storytelling devices to deliver a relatable story about the elusiveness of success, but also its pointlessness. The potency of dangerous misunderstandings, and how frequently they can affect everyday life, reminds me of Bong Joon-ho. These boo-boos do what they’re supposed to, keep passers-by like me binging, but they’re not (as with Joon-ho) always glued together by steady, patient particle physics. Danny’s brother and Amy’s husband, the primary secondary characters, are afforded but singular opportunities in the clutch, to challenge their existences as beautiful meatheads — to raze the facades erected by the show’s warring protagonists.
My one problem with Beef, which I have otherwise enjoyed, is that those opportunities aren’t always wrought directly from the electricity between bodies. Beef wants to have its cake and eat it; fast-forward through the highly crucial dialogue, for instance, that leads a terrible but comfortable artist to believe a complete stranger ‘gets’ him; or leads a man’s ex to believe he has convincingly rediscovered Jesus, and is once again the man she loved before she got married; or leads a modern bro to believe he has connected and then disconnected emotionally with a wealthy curator of vibes. Too much of this is narrated via spirited report, and not portrayed in film time at all. Too often for my liking, lead characters have phone-calls to make or places to be suddenly, so they can creep out of scene to crank up fresh chainsaws. I wish the show could find ways to elevate its stakes in the quiet moments it considers garbage time, maximise the aesthetic beauty hiding in the crevices where a show can justify its raw fantasy as real life.
Maybe that’s two or three more episodes the budget simply couldn’t facilitate, to let these relationships cause, enter, and conclusively navigate fallout. But it’s just one explosion to the next with Beef. When the show leans into the little things, it indulges sadness as its anti-heroes’ core sympathetic trait. That investment in the emotionally spectacular makes it hard to believe these characters are really confronting the immigrant, blue-collar strife it probably correctly presumes constitutes real life for real-life Asian-Americans. It’s setting off too many dopamine bombs, and we’re lapping up all the catastrophe.
It’s a weird thing, new even, to say I didn’t love a show I basically wolfed down in a day and a half; whose cast dazzles from top to bottom, in spite of a slightly (slightly!) wanting script; that finally takes place in cultural settings besides milky white Hollywood ones; and that will allow Yeun and Wong, hopefully, to jam boots through the industry’s door. But maybe that’s actually testament to Beef’s eye-test excellence, and how unlikable Yeun and Wong were able to make its protagonists. I bought a ticket to the ride as soon as they went on sale, I got awfully sick as it arched down the bends, but hell — I staggered right back to the top of the queue, again and again.
