2023’s “Beef” was so good that a limited series turned into an anthology with creator Lee Sung Jin hoping to avoid the sophomore slump with another twisted, unpredictable tale of anger and class with entirely new characters. The multiple Emmy-winning original told the tale of a pair of fractured people whose chance encounter sent ripples across both their lives. The second season of “Beef” expands its net to entangle two couples at very different stages of love and life, again thrust together by an angry outburst. Once again, the writing is as good as anything on television as Lee’s gift for dialogue and storytelling shines through all eight episodes, a series that so thoroughly avoids the common drag of Netflix bloat that its pace should be studied by anyone who gets a contract with the streaming giant. One of this era’s best ensembles digs into the witty repartee and complex characters provided by Lee’s writer’s room, leaving you wondering who is to blame and who to root for. The answers are everybody. And nobody.
Oscar Isaac plays Josh Martin, a general manager of a country club who is wealthy by anyone’s standards, but he’s found himself in a world of the uber-rich, people who bet thousands on single hands of poker with Michael Phelps. Josh doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of money, which makes it harder to swim with those sharks, and the stress caused by a bed-and-breakfast project he’s been working on with his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) has been actively eating away at their relationship. Surrounded by signs of the life he never had as a musician in his man cave, Josh fights an OnlyFans addiction while Lindsay is even more active in her infidelity, texting old flames before blocking them out of regret and flirting with the handsome tennis pro at the club. She very clearly resents and probably has grown to hate Josh.
And she doesn’t hesitate to tell him all of this in the premiere’s inciting incident, a no-holds-barred fight in which Josh and Lindsay seem to be heading to divorce if they don’t kill each other first. As the two reach an angry climax in which it looks one might actually hurt the other, they look outside to see one of Josh’s employees, a drink cart girl from the club named Ashley (Cailee Spaeny). She’s been watching with her puppy dog of a fiancée Austin (Charles Melton). And they weren’t just watching. They were recording.
Ashley and Austin, an aspiring personal trainer, seem like decent, ordinary people. They regret invading the privacy of the Martins—they were there to return the wallet that Josh left at the club—but everything changes when they realize they have been presented with an opportunity. What will Josh and Lindsay do to keep that violent secret buried? Even in the middle of an active blackmail, Ashley and Austin try to hold onto their humanity. She just wants a better job at the club; he eventually wants some opportunities as a trainer. And then “Beef” takes the first of many fascinating twists as Josh and Lindsay seem less infuriated by their blackmailers and more inspired. After all, they’re owed a few things by a broken system, too.
“We’re not bad people, they are.” This line is at the core of the thematic foundation of “Beef.” No one ever thinks the morally questionable behavior in which they are partaking makes them bad. They find ways out of that kind of logic, usually by pointing at someone who’s even worse. And this season has a lot of fun playing with the varied morality on the rungs of the economic ladder. Josh/Lindsay may be rich compared to Austin/Ashley, but they’re nothing when contrasted against the new owner of Josh’s country club, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung, who won an Oscar for “Minari”), or her famous plastic surgeon husband Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho of “Parasite”). At its core, “Beef” is about three couples who make increasingly bad decisions that are influenced by their place on the most important spectrum in this world: the wealth one.
Just the second episode alone is a masterpiece of desperation: a character study of people who think they have discovered loopholes in a broken system who will eventually learn that they are actually nooses. It’s here where Lee’s writers and ensemble really dig into these characters to reveal the nuance of their performances. Melton avoids “dumb guy” stereotypes by understanding that Austin genuinely wants to be decent, even as he starts to feel tempted by Chairwoman Park’s gorgeous assistant Eunice (Seoyeon Jang). Isaac avoids the sweaty desperation that could have turned Josh into a caricature, always playing the realism of the predicament in front of him. He understands a character who has talked his way out of many business problems and, in the process, talked his way into a life he hates. Mulligan, Youn, and Song are all predictably great.
However, if the season has an MVP it’s Cailee Spaeny, who gets to use some acting tools she had yet to employ. In films like “Priscilla” and “Alien Romulus,” she’s often very heavy as a performer, leaning into serious notes that fit those roles, but she’s buoyant and very funny here, getting us to immediately like Ashley, and then testing that likability with some truly horrible decisions. It is easily one of the best performances of the year, the peak of its best ensemble.
The endgame of the second season of “Beef” relies on an incredible amount of coincidences like a quickly repeated conversation from a party and an overheard one on a plane, but the writing has done so much strong work by this point that these devices can be forgiven. It’s really a show that works on so many levels, from individual jokes that reflect a sense of humor that understands the pop culture world of 2026 to the bigger issues of wealth inequity, gender disparity, and even the generation gap.
There’s a refined simplicity to the first season of “Beef” in its inciting incident of a middle finger in a parking lot that is a bit missed in a second outing that’s less immediately relatable, but that feeling fades away as one grasps the ambition of the entire piece. If people saw themselves in the protagonists of the first “Beef,” you can see the world in this one, a study of how wealth divides our society, but can also unite people like Austin, Ashley, Josh, and Lindsay through their shared truth: They’re all broken.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.