Beef season 2 is the bonkers thriller that’s worth keeping your Netflix subscription for

Netflix’s lean, mean limited series Beef has done the quintessential thing of our TV age and reworked itself to justify making more.

I don’t need to tell you about the 2023 original, because how could you forget it? Steven Yeun and Ali Wong narrowly avoided colliding their cars, but spiralled out in a twisted, years-long tale of revenge.

Show creator Lee Sung Jin has injected that DNA into this second season, which follows in the footsteps of High School Musical and sets its sequel at a country club. 

The inciting beef here doesn’t quite have the random alchemy of season one’s road rage incident, but it does have Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan going at it. 

Isaac plays Josh, the country club’s long-serving, people-pleasing manager. Mulligan is his wife Lindsay, a trust fund Brit whose money well has dried up paying for her mother-in-law’s hospital bills (this is America).

These two had fun when they were music-loving young people. Now, Josh can only derive pleasure from OnlyFans and Lindsay is texting exes. The one thing they agree on is their love for their sausage pup Burberry.

The comparatively young, broke and loved-up club employees Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) stumble upon the other two having a row of epic, golf club-wielding proportions. Their response is a Gen Z one: they record it.

With that, the battle lines are drawn in what becomes a war of attrition between the two couples. The millennials dream of escaping the rat race to set up a bed and breakfast, while the younger lot just want to be able to pay their medical bills (again, America).

The spiralling feud doesn’t take us to the mania of the first season, but it comes close.

One moment in particular involves a home break-in, menstrual blood and orange juice being hypnotically swirled together. The juice is worth the squeeze, because you’ll watch it through your fingers. 

Their combat zone is the club, where several famous faces make cameos (I won’t spoil them, but they’re pleasantly unpredictable). William Fichtner plays a jerk rich guy who unofficially runs the place, when he isn’t having sex in the pool with his much younger wife.

The owner is elusive billionaire Chairwoman Park (Pachinko’s Youn Yuh-jung), who has established a club-to-Korea pipeline for wealthy women to go under the knife of her husband, Dr Kim, played by Parasite star Song Kang-ho. Except he’s developed a tremor, so those scalpel skills are no longer so precise.

At first, the Seoul storyline takes you out of the pressure cooker of our warring twosome at the club. But these two halves epicly collide in an action thriller finale, filmed in the South Korean capital. 

The show has much to say about the fallacy of the American dream, where everyone else has already ‘grabbed the bag’. The country club is a blunt instrument, but it does neatly lay out that wealth disparity.

The eight-parter also picks at the evergreen scab of romantic compatibility. The sparring within the couples is often even more compelling than their battle with each other. Each has a hyper-specific set of neuroses. Whose side you’re on will shift from moment to moment. 

There isn’t a weak link in Isaac, Mulligan, Spaeny and Melton, but it might be the Riverdale star who embodies the most original character.

Austin is a Korean-American jock who doesn’t really know any Korean people and who relies on the wiles of ChatGPT and Reddit to guide his life choices. The show moonlights as his coming-of-age tale.

The standout of the premiere red carpet was the little bashful pup playing Burberry. If you, like many, saw the clip of him standing on his hind legs and felt your insides melt, proceed with extreme caution.

With this many characters and storylines to unspool, credit must go to creator Lee for keeping this narrative on track. Beef is on its way to being Netflix’s very own version of The White Lotus. (There are similar artsy title cards.)

The ending is a reverse deus ex machina that will no doubt infuriate viewers. It kept popping into my mind in the days after watching and underlines that season-long drumbeat that, alas, life is unfair.

Beef is available to stream on Netflix now.

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