The self-contained first season of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef is one of my favorite TV shows of the last few years.
The pitch is that two people—boutique small business owner Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and struggling contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun)—wind up in road rage chase that they then double and triple down on until the consequences feel like a localized apocalypse. But they get there one decision at a time, and everything in them and the people around them factors in. At its best—and roughly eight and a half episodes out of the ten are the show at its best—this is a pacy, funny, weird, and darkly engaging half-hour drama that I recommend to pretty much everyone.
I’ll get the caveats out of the way first. In the eighth episode, the show makes the mistake of including flashbacks that mostly only underline characterization details we’ve already established: Amy feels unlovable and is terrified of revealing her true self to anyone, and Danny has a toxic need to be needed. The flashbacks are such a needlessly navel-gazing speed bump to some otherwise joyously escalating storytelling that I even resent that there is one plot-relevant incident buried in them, one that plays too major a role to be seeded in so late and so inorganically. But, crucially, that’s only about half of the episode, and the present-day section is close to wall-to-wall major decisions and breakneck choices.
The other episode I marked out as an exception is the finale, and it’s harder to classify. In many ways, it’s a beautiful send-off, with an especially memorable final image. But it’s a conclusion to the show’s ideas, not to its story. All throughout Beef, it’s easy to see that despite all the surface-level differences—and all the bad blood—between them, Amy and Danny are alike beneath the skin. The first episode even emphasizes this with a laugh-out-loud needle drop of Hoobastank’s “The Reason” as these two fucked-up people zero in on how their enmity offers them the chance for all the heedless, untrammeled awfulness they’d otherwise have to hide. Their missed connection is the bleak, bittersweet heart here, and I understand why the finale wants to finally trap them in a situation where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but (eventually, painfully) understand and empathize. Taken on the heels of the ecstatic, doomed ending of the episode before it, it’s a contemporary dramedy version of Tolkien’s eucatastrophe: what if grace intervened to bail them out?
But a narrowly averted total disaster is the kind of story it’s hard to tell well. It’s a shape no one (except maybe Tolkien) has ever gotten much of a hand on, and honestly, it may need a more heightened register—a religious influence, explicit or implicit—to sell it, because it depends on the fact that everything until then tended toward a different outcome. It ought to be a legitimate function of art to explore relief and rescue, especially with the reasonable honesty this finale opts for, where a whole lot remains thoroughly fucked, but I suspect this last episode will only work for viewers on a case-by-case basis. Some—including me, at least sometimes—will argue the ninth episode is the natural ending. It works perfectly well on that front.
Overall, though, this works like gangbusters. The story has the speed of a thriller and the density of a mystery where the most innocuous details, like Danny’s love of Skittles, eventually take on huge importance. (This is more recommendation than essay, so I’m loath to get into specifics.) It remembers one of my favorite dramatic truisms and gives its supporting cast minds and drives of their own, so—as only one example—Danny can’t call off a robbery once he’s already looped two boneheaded would-be henchmen in on it. Nothing is simple and clean in a world with real people accumulating real damage.
That also lets characters get introduced as more flatly comedic and then pick up dramatic weight as the story moves along. Danny’s younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), starts off as a cool but sullen twenty-something and becomes a major linchpin of the plot (and one who cares all too much). Amy’s husband, George (Joseph Lee), is the kind of willfully optimistic sweetheart who, when finding out a rogue contractor has pissed all over his bathroom, tries to be understanding even as he’s on his hands and knees scrubbing it up: “You never know what someone’s going through in life. Might be bladder issues.” He lives in the shadow of his father, a famous designer who left behind an artistic legacy that George, who makes globby, inconveniently shaped vases the color of melted sprinkles, can’t equal, and George’s vases starts off as a joke—one more thing Amy grits her teeth to be nice about—and then play an unexpectedly poignant role in connecting him with Danny, who honestly does like them. (Lee plays the whole scene as someone who on some level knows he’s been loved before but never taken seriously.)
I tend to call this a drama rather than a comedy because its purpose—again, until that last episode—is primarily about an escalating, angry tragedy, but it’s also hilarious: the ninth episode alone provides maybe the best punchline ever about an Amber Alert, people singing “Pop Goes the Weasel” while frantically providing choking instructions, and an absolutely brutal death that nonetheless has me hooting and hollering every time. The two best comedic forces here are the aforementioned George (“I can’t even enjoy anything vanilla since her comment,” he says, trying to process Amy’s dismissal of their sex life) and Danny’s scene-stealing cousin Isaac (David Choe), a constantly hustling criminal prone to both intimacy and grandiosity (“Give me a front hug. None of that side hug shit. Tip to tip”).
But I do think the best moments are the dramatic ones, like the ownage-filled intercutting montage at the end of the sixth episode, when Danny makes a gleefully ruthless decision that neatly ties off a lot of dangling plot threads that could have stitched him up for good. I agree that we’re all broken and should try to connect with each other in our brokenness, but sometimes—as Danny and Amy know—what you really want to do is watch things burn. And that can bring us together too.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileMore articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
One of the show's worst husbands has a bad time in Vegas.
Anthologized
A worthwhile revision of a radio classic.
Anthologized
A solid punchline (but not enough punch).
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episode Nineteen, “Hawkeye”
“You speak English? I speak Korean, but just enough to get my face slapped.”
“The Pierces have been in Maine since 1680. Some of them are dead now.”
“See, what’s happened here is that my brain has sloshed over to the other side of my skull, and is even now as we’re speaking turning purple. You may have noticed certain purple patches in the literary excess of my spoken word. But don’t worry, I’ll keep it clean in front of the children.”
“Well, that’s enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think of me so far?”
This is the famous one which is, as the name implies, Hawkeye talking to himself. I enjoy that, early on, he observes that there’s no medical basis for believing that falling asleep during a concussion will kill you; it adds a layer of both desperation and play here. If what Hawkeye talks about here sums him up, he’s a creature of equal parts nostalgia and curiosity – he spends half the time dropping anecdotes and theater/film references and the other half fascinated with the meaning behind everyday objects like the thumb. I also enjoy him ironically pretending the family has any clue what he’s saying and acts as if they’re talking along with him; this feels like pure Hawkeye, where he’s always half-talking to himself anyway.
I also enjoy that it ends with him visiting the family again and dropping off presents, and they’re even genuinely pleased to see him. He’s self-absorbed but he does also care about the people around him.
Babylon 5, “And the Sky Full of Stars,” “Deathwalker,” and “Believers”
“And the Sky Full of Stars” is perversely light on content, maybe because it’s trying to accomplish a very specific task–reveal, to us and to him, that Sinclair was once captured by the Minbari Grey Council (including Delenn) and mentally dissected in such a way that ended the war and left him with a hole in his memories, one he’s pretending to Delenn still persists. That’s good, meaty material, but everything outside of that revelation feels a bit weightless.
“Deathwalker” and “Believers,” in contrast, go almost all-in on the episodic material, crafting two strong moral dilemmas for the characters to face (and, in the latter case, going to an extreme place with it: I predicted the final turn of that to my wife but then said that I doubted a ’90s sci-fi show would go for it, saying, “That’s more how this would end on The Shield,” but then it did end that way, fucking hell, and good for it). I especially like “Believers” for that, with its layers–it’s a good touch that Sinclair rules against Franklin because his top moral priority is preserving Babylon 5 as a station aliens will voluntarily come to, and they won’t come if they feel the humans in charge will overrule their beliefs–its lack of pulled punches, and its fleshing-out of Franklin via a messy, complicated decision.
But Sarah Douglas is also a great guest presence in “Deathwalker,” and her dark satisfaction and certainty at the end is so compelling that I just wish we could’ve had even more of it, without Kosh ex machina.
“Believers” is so good it ends up defining Franklin for me for the rest of the show – he’s the guy who will follow the safety of his patients down to a Shieldian level. It actually sets up a really dodgy plot later, when it feels like Franklin does something wildly out of character. I also think that Kosy ex machina will pay off emotionally later, when more of Kosh’s character is revealed. This is early in the story, where ass pulls can be meaningful for what they imply later.
Oscar – Late in the Prohibition era, mob boss Sylvester Stallone makes a promise to his dying father to go straight. Only little does he know that his life is about to turn into a French farce. I had long been curious about this one, and went with it as it’s one of the few movies featuring Tim Curry easily available. (Believe me, if I still had Disney Plus, I would have gone with Muppet Treasure Island or an episode of Gargoyles or Darkwing Duck.) Curry plays Sly’s elocution teacher, and has an unlikely (and age inappropriate) romance with Marisa Tomei, and of course does well with the role (and is the only person in the movie who has any chemistry with Tomei in her first movie role). The rest of the proceedings, an adaptation of a French play and movie, are a mess since John Landis’s desire to create a modern day screwball comedy doesn’t quite work – the kind of humor in a screwball comedy and that of a French farce don’t really work as one. But the cast is generally game, and to my surprise Stallone and his main henchmen Chazz Palminteri and Peter Riegert are actually good with comedy. The cast features a horde of familiar faces: William Atherton and Ken Howard are very good as members of a banking family reluctant to let Sly invest in their bank; Kurtwood Smith is flat as a crusading DA; Don Ameche is amiable as a priest; and Kirk Douglas is a bit over the top as the dying dad. (Was there a trend to cast famous aging actors as dying parents in bit parts? The same thing was done with Anne Bancroft in Honeymoon in Vegas.)
Elementary, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” – What seems to be a carjacking gone fatally wrong for both victim and perp turns out to be a hit job that became a faked death that became two murders. Within the contours of the show it’s all just a normal day for Holmes and Watson, but this is not a very interesting case. Of more note is that the man Joan was blackmailing into spying on Morland first tells her he’s done, and then is found dead at episode’s end. Time to set up the season finale.
Palminteri is also quite funny in Bullets Over Broadway as the mobster who slowly discovers that he is really good at writing the play Cusack’s character is making. (There’s some fun contrast in Cusack’s typically Allen-esque neurotic artist and Palminteri’s brash killer whose talent is innate, not self-conscious.)
The Carol Burnett Show – Inspired to start watching this on Tubi and skipped the pilot. It’s already very funny on the second episode which tracks given that it stars Harvey Korman and, well, Carol Burnett. Her energy is very much “most enthusiastic and weird person in a situation” and as far as I can tell this creates a good formula: generic setups twisted and changed by her characters. She’s an innately funny physical comedian, throwing herself into the scene, like Carol on a sleeping pill during her sister’s college interview as she struggles to stay awake while leaning heavily into Korman and slumping all over the room.
Drank with a friend and showed her some Kyle Kinane, an incredibly funny comedian and the reversal of Burnett: deadpan, verbose jokes that rely on their linguistics, the energy of a hardcore punk dad sharing a beer and telling stories about his life.