Review of Netflix’s Beef (2023)

I, like so many other people in the world, found out about Beef through social media. Which is shocking considering I work in entertainment journalism and somehow had no idea that A24 was making a television show, let alone one with Steven Yeun and Ali Wong.

Granted, I only review shows and don’t cover the news, so when I saw everyone posting about Beef on social media, I began to get really curious. As a master procrastinator, I usually don’t watch the shows soon after they come out unless it’s for work, but somehow I ended sitting down with this one immediately one night at midnight.

And that’s the story of how I binged all of Beef over the course of a day. Don’t ask me how I did it with work and school, but I made it happen.

It being only ten episodes with thirty minutes worth of content definitely helped my little speed run, but I was genuinely impressed with this little show. Lots of heart captured in it, but we’ll get to that more in the review portion of this post.

Onwards with the review!

A road rage incident escalates to an elaborate, dark comedy of a revenge plot.

The beginning of Beef starts with laying down the foundations of what exactly the beef is. Steven Yeun portrays Danny Cho, a contractor struggling to get business in Los Angeles. He’s Korean-American, lives with his brother in his apartment, and is basically begging for clients at this point.

His parents are also calling to see how he’s doing, making him slowly start to crumble with the pressure of being the eldest son and needing to succeed. He’s at a store buying mini barbecue plates when, in the parking, he starts to back out of the spot and the owner of a white car happens to be behind him.

So begins an incident of road rage. Danny chases after her, his little grills sacrificed to the pavement (they weren’t secured to the back of his truck, and when he starts chasing the white car, they fall out onto the road), and kickstarts a feud that’s going to last the next ten episodes.

The owner of the white car is Amy Lau, who married a rich nepotism baby (his dad was a famous sculptor) and now owns her business. She’s the definition of certain California stereotypes.

When Danny tracks her down to her home in a wealthy neighborhood, he poses as a contractor looking to do some work with her, and then pees all over her bathroom. Amy isn’t going to back down and discovers who he is, then leaves a bunch of negative reviews on his Yelp (which doesn’t have stellar reviews to begin with).

That’s the nutshell of episode one, but it lays down the madness to come. Amy ends up posing as another woman on Instagram and catfishes Danny’s brother, engaging in an affair in the name of revenge, while Danny gets caught up with his cousin who’s fresh out of jail and on parole.

Side plots here include the fact that Amy is trying to expand her business with a wealthy white woman named Joanna, who has an Asian sister-in-law that slowly becomes more and more pissed off at Amy, leading her to investigate the road rage incident on her own.

At the same time, Danny starts to get more involved at a local church, tapping into some repressed emotions—in one of the later episodes, he can be seen singing in the church band while looking like he’s about to start sobbing any minute now.

Both Danny and Amy take their road rage and anger to the extreme in attempts to get back at each other, basically leading their lives astray. Danny realizes how screwed up all of this is when he meets Amy’s husband, but gets sucked back into things when his cousin’s lackeys end up robbing Amy’s house despite him telling them not to.

His cousin increasingly becomes more shady as the episodes go on, leading to the final standoff that ends up with death.

On Amy’s side of things, we learn that not only is she engaging in an affair, but she has serious issues in general. A lot of what the show tries to chalk it up to is Mommy and Daddy issues, and when she does end up going home to see her parents at one point, it’s pretty tense between her and them.

This show has a lot of underlying themes and contexts about what it means to be Asian-American, and there’s some pretty big indicators physically that ground the characters in that. Some iconic Koreatown eateries in Los Angeles serve as the backdrop for some scenes, and Korean-Americans will definitely recognize the church aspect of the culture in the diaspora.

But, by the end of the show, it all spirals into something bigger and messier than what it started out with. It’s so entertaining, but as we see from the last moments, all of this could have been prevented. Lots of lives, and Amy’s marriage, were ruined by the events these two caused in the name of petty revenge.

There’s also some underlying class analysis one could do about all of this—Danny, the hardworking son of immigrants, ends up with the short stick. One could argue Amy also fits into this category, but she’s on the same coin but the opposite side.

She had the American Dream and the prospects of wealth until the end of her life—juxtaposed against the simple home her parents lived in—but she loses it all because George probably is divorcing her.

Overall Thoughts

Watch the show if you haven’t already. I think there’s so much to learn outside of the fact this is dubbed a fictional show; there’s some unique characteristics to the Asian-American and California communities that are simply very recognizable throughout.

There could definitely be some deeper class, race, and gender analysis about everything going on, but as a tired graduate student, my brain can only handle so much analysis in a single blog post. There’s an element of absurdity to everything going on, too, making the dark comedy elements go so much deeper and hit harder, but, at the end of the day, when shit hits the fan, then it only becomes more entertaining for us as the viewer.

The acting is also incredible, making it so much more believable on the screen.

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