REVIEW: ‘Beef’ Season 2 Is Even Better Than The Last

When BEEF first premiered at SXSW in 2023, it was clear it was going to leave an impact. Now, with a new anthology format, BEEF Season 2 isn’t sticking to any formula other than the simmering anger that every day people are bubbling under the surface because of the choices they’ve made in life or have been made for them. 

With a larger ensemble than the first season, the series features Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny. Additionally, the series’ guest stars include two of South Korea’s largest actors, Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho. Lee Sung Jin, the series’s creator, writer, and showrunner, also serves as director. 

Having moved from a parking lot fit of road rage to a country club, BEEF Season 2 doesn’t lose its perspective on class, race, or how relationships can rot from the inside. The series pits generation against generation as lies and selfishness cloud good intentions and collide.

BEEF Season 2 embraces a larger ensemble cast with thoughtful storytelling.

The first couple is the youngest, with Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny playing a newly engaged Gen-Z couple, Ashley Miller and Austin Davis. Living together and struggling to get by, Austin is a 29-year-old part-time trainer at the country club who is trying to make it big as an Instagram trainer and prove that he has grown and changed since college. Ashley is trying to make a future for herself, but she has no high school diploma and is stuck as a drink cart girl instead. 

Right above Ashley and Austin on the class scale is Millennial married couple Joshua Martin (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan). Josh is the General Manager of the country club and is completely obsessed with status and who he knows. Lindsay is an interior designer with little to no work who gave up another life and fortune to be with her husband. 

And finally, there is the couple at the top of the class ladder, who seemingly hold everyone else in their hands: the billionaire owner of the country club, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), and her surgeon husband, Doctor Kim (Song Kang-ho). It’s here where culture clash meets class clash throughout the season’s eight episodes. 

Like Season 1, BEEF Season 2 has one inciting incident. Here, it’s a marital dispute that spirals as Lindsay grabs a golf club and begins destroying everything in Josh’s shed. Only, when Josh tries to disarm her, that’s when Ashley and Austin start recording. When the young couple decides to use this as an opportunity for self-improvement by blackmailing Josh and Lindsay, the dominoes start to fall. 

As lies grow and everyone’s circumstances become more dire, the chaotic, messy web begins to tighten around everyone in unison, as everything devolves. But it’s not just the two couples trying to maintain power over the other, they’re also trying to vie for the favor of Chairwoman Park to keep their jobs. 

Josh and Lindasy are forced to come to terms with their love-starved and resentment-filled marriage. The promises that were broken and continue to be, the lies, and a need to feel loved all push the couple to their breaking point as they try to succeed, defend themselves against the incriminating video, and fight each other. 

Every performance in Beef Season 2 is a stunner, but Oscar Isaac and Youn Yuh-jung still stand out.

As Josh, Oscar Isaac plays pathetic oh-so-well. His desperation for attention and praise is hard to watch at times as his selfishness continuously pushes him into a downward spiral. Isaac’s performance is one of the best of the season, and to even declare one of the ensemble performances the “best” feels like splitting hairs. However, Isaac’s ability to be charming one moment and repulsive the next is a testament to how well he emotes and uses every tool at his disposal. 

Carey Mulligan’s performance is also stellar, consistently matching Isaac’s energy and emotion in scenes that move from somber to happy and rage-filled. As Lindsay, Mulligan’s performance captures a woman struggling to find a light in her marriage while constantly comparing herself to richer and younger women. It’s a look at a woman struggling to love herself because she lost everything to be with the man she loves. 

And on the other side, Ashley and Austin are a sickly sweet young couple who have their rose-colored glasses shattered as medical debt mounts and lies begin to snowball. They have to watch the future they planned for themselves slipping further and further out of reach, even when they have moments of success. For them, their lies feel like survival and a realization of the lot they have been cast in life.

However, as anxiety increases, their choices start to devolve quickly. Add in the fact that Austin is experiencing having other Koreans around him for the first time and discovering his culture through Chairwoman Park’s translator and secretary, and jealousy also joins the volatile emotional mix. 

Charles Melton’s Austin is defined by his naivety and sincere love for Ashley. Not without his faults, especially when he begins to feel like Ashley is leaving him behind, Austin is the most endearing character in Beef Season 2 and helps define the characters’ stage of brokenness. Loving and honest, his innocence is hard to watch erode, but when it does, the audience realizes just how far all the characters have fallen. 

As for Spaeny’s Ashley, she balances out Austin’s innocence, having lived a harder life than he has. She is quicker to exploit the Martins and Chairwoman Park, but she is also more desperately needs to be seen as something more than a high school dropout. At the same time, medical issues mount, pushing her to confront the chance that she may never be a mother, further complicating her relationship with her fiancé. 

While Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho steal every scene they are in, their roles in the series serve more as a point of power and eventual anger. The top of the class ladder, Chairwoman Park and her husband have no qualms about using their crooked employees to take care of themselves. Continuing the old adage that no billionaire got that way without doing something bad, the duo’s privilege and status have shielded them. But now, with more eyes on them, it’s starting to come undone. 

Beef Season 2 is larger than the first without losing any of the intimacy. 

BEEF Season 2 has a larger cast with more mess and interpersonal drama than the first season. There are more twists and surprising decisions that alter the course of the story. And yet, all of it works. BEEF Season 2 is an exercise in understanding the rot that grows from resentment and unrealized emotions.

But where Season 1 was about individuals, the second season of BEEF is more interested in capturing how relationships carry the weight of selfish choices and how the rot begins to eventually surface, no matter how many times each couple tries to paint over it. This dynamic doesn’t improve on the previous season of the series, but it does explore anger, hate, and the shame that follows them more holistically—until it doesn’t. 

This series captures the worst in us in the best way. Throughout BEEF Season 2, the characters become visibly less put together and more gaunt as their morals spiral down the drain; you can see it draining them. The visual language of the series is just as well-executed as the script, painting the descent into their manic, reactive decisions through costuming and makeup decisions. 

Additionally, no one character in this season ends up likable, or even defensible. BEEF continues to prove that you don’t need to like or approve of a character to be moved by what is happening to them, as everyone’s life begins to grow darker.

Less shocking than the first season, Lee Sung Jin pulls back on some of the raunchier elements from before to dial in on the more heartbreaking rock-bottom moments, crafting a story with less rage and something more intimate altogether. 

BEEF Season 2 highlights the best way to do an anthology series. The answer isn’t to have the same thing happen over and over, or even use recurring characters to tie together each vignette or season. Instead, Lee Sung Jin builds the second season on top of the emotional foundation he created in Season 1, and the result is capturing the same way the first season made audiences feel. With only two seasons, it may be too premature to call the series revolutionary for the anthology format, but it is getting close. 

BEEF Season 2 is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.

Season 1 |