When Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) nearly backs into Amy Lau (Ali Wong) in the parking lot of a home improvements store in Los Angeles he doesn't do what most of us would do. Apologise, wave her through, or simply ignore the very minor incident. Instead, the red mist descends and not just for him. Horns are beeped, Amy flips Danny the bird, and, before you know it, they're involved in a fairly implausible road rage fuelled car chase which manages to ruin some of California's most finely manicured lawns.
This is the the start of the beef in Netflix's Beef (created by Lee Sung Jin and directed by him too as well as Hikari and Jake Schreier) and if it sounds like a very slim premise then don't worry. Stick with it. It's hugely watchable, good fun, and though the beef itself is never far from the heart of the drama it does a great job of drilling down into both Danny's and Amy's lives and backgrounds.
As if to try and understand why they're both so angry. Their anger, and their Asian-American identities, it seems, at least at first, are all they share. They're very different. Danny is a struggling contractor (definitely not a handyman, a word he baulks at) living with his messy, crypto currency obsessed, brother Paul (Young Mazino). Their parents have lost the motel they used to run and have moved back to South Korea.
Amy is a stressed out, but very wealthy, owner of a successful small business, Koyohaus, that sells bespoke plants. She lives in a very nice house with a 'timeless kitchen' and she uses a gun to masturbate. Not that her husband, George (Joseph Lee), knows about that. George is a sculptor of vases and George is also a very modern, anxious, man who talks about mindfulness, meditation, focusing on the positives, and 'gratitude journals'.
Precious George believes "anger is just a transitory state of consciousness" which, to be fair, it probably is. But that's not much use for Amy and her short temper. Amy and George's daughter June (Remy Holt) is ridiculously sweet and, appropriately enough, she gets to deliver some of the sweetest lines of the entire show. June loves her parents and she also loves her grandmother, George's mum Fumi (Patti Yasutake).
All of them will eventually be caught up in Danny and Amy's ever spiralling beef. As will Isaac (David Choe), Danny and Paul's larger than life cousin who has recently been released from prison (for involvement in a racket concerning counterfeit baby formula) and seems likely to be back there again soon, and Jordan (Mario Bello) who runs the home improvement store, Forsters, and whom Amy is hoping to strike a deal with.
Jordan comes across as a fairly awful person. She talks as if she's deeply spiritual but her only god appears to be mammon. Everything has a price and Jordan can always afford it. She lives in a huge house that is bigger than most museums I've visited, hosts extravagantly pretentious mushroom dinners, considers shy children to be impolite, and is due to marry her brother's ex-wife Naomi (Ashley Park). Naomi is a woman with too much time on her hands which may become a problem for Amy.
Beef is styled as a dark comedy and it's certainly dark (and weird) in places (more so as the series progresses) but, despite some very good dialogue, it's not laugh out loud funny. Although you have to marvel at choice lines like "I don't fuck guns", "I know a handyman urinated in your bathroom", and "I almost set a baby on fire" and, equally, you have to admire the bizarre episode titles. I Am Inhabited By A Cry. Such Inward Secret Creatures. I Am A Cage. Or even The Birds Don't Sing, They Scream In Pain.
What with that, and chances to learn about the K-Town riots of the early nineties and the Dick Cheney crow experiment (as well as alternate lyrics to Pop Goes The Weasel) it may sound like Beef is trying too hard to be artsy and edgy but when you watch it it doesn't feel like that. It flows easily as the quarrel goes from threatening phone calls, pissing on bathroom floors, and Instagram catfishing to vandalised pick up trucks and, eventually, far more serious situations.
It helps that both Danny and Amy, despite their fatal flaws - that red mist will descend again - at one point literally, are both charming characters you can't help rooting for. Yeun and Wong really inhabit the roles and the rest of the cast are great too (honourable shout outs to Justin H.Min as church leaded Edwin, Alyssa Gihee Kim as Veronica, Edwin's wife (and Danny's ex), Mia Serafino as a woman who works for Amy and idolises both her and George, and Rek Lee and Andrew Santino (Mike from Dave, lots of the people involved with Beef also worked on Dave) as two of Isaac's morally dubious cronies.
The soundtrack's interesting. The incidental music comes courtesy of Bobby Krlic, the Yorkshire dark ambient artist who's put a couple of albums out under the name of The Haxan Cloak and found favour on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, but each episode ends with a song and it's hard to escape the fact that they, more or less, all seem to come from a certain time period.
About twenty years back. So you get to hear the likes of Bush, Keane, Bjork, Tori Amos, The Offspring, System Of A Down, Grant Lee Buffalo, Smashing Pumpkins' Mayonnaise, and Hoobastank's deathless The Reason. Some of the songs are great (Morphine's Cure For Pain particularly), some less so but they all work well in the context of Beef.
It may be far fetched and rely on an extraordinary amount of confected coincidences to propel the story forward, and even have a rather odd corvid subplot, but that doesn't really matter. All of that, and the fact that people often act very strangely, is what makes Beef such a success. It's not a docudrama, it's not social realism. If anything, it's a parable. A parable about anger, about revenge, and about how to address one's demons. Go with it. Enjoy the ride. Don't get mad, get even.
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