Netflix’s Beef follows a rich Korean storytelling tradition of genre-bending, offering viewers a sophisticated blend of dark comedy, drama, thriller, and social commentary. The show’s Korean American writer and director, Lee Sung Jin, draws inspiration from this tradition as well as Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self: the idea that denying or repressing parts of ourselves can harm us and others when we fail to integrate them into our self-knowledge.
Season two of Beef (2026) is thematically and spiritually related to, but otherwise different from, season one, which is a phenomenon in its own right. The new season has different characters and conflicts, although an early Easter egg in the first episode (a long, angry honk and a near-collision) is a wink to the road-rage incident that spins absurdly, then horrifyingly, into the ghastly feud of Season 1. [Spoilers ahead.]
If Season 1 of Beef was enough to give you a tension headache that you refused to placate by turning off the television, Season 2 is even more addictively high-stakes, tightly wound, and explicit in its view. Holding up a mirror to capitalism and its inherent class strife, the reflection is not pretty.
Season two contrasts the lives of the ultra-wealthy with those whose services make their privileged worlds possible. It signifies class distinctions through the things rich people own (private jets, winter chalets), their power to influence elections and policy, and the labor and lives of those who serve them. The difference between those who casually spend $40k on a trip to South Korea for cosmetic surgery and those who will do almost anything just to get access to health insurance, whatever the cost or quality of that insurance, is stark.
However, this is not a show that squarely places the blame for the conflicts on class. Obviously, everyone participates in the capitalist system (though some clearly benefit more than others) — and in the process of trying to balance the scales, some people become the very thing they hate. They are consumed by their shadow selves. Their growing rage, greed, and shame remain unconfronted.
Composed by Finneas O’Connell, the show’s score is positively sticky. Compositions range from dreamy sequences that hint at hope to nervous, antsy tracks that fray the nerves bit by bit. Episode 4, “Oh, the Comfort, the Inexpressible Comfort”, set almost entirely in the ER of a hospital that could be Anywhere, U.S.A., is Beef‘s trippiest and most dystopian episode, and the music that underlies it is quietly dreadful. The show’s needle drops are also perfectly timed to heighten its absurd tone: “Off, off with your head, dance, dance till you’re dead,” the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs sing to a danceable beat in a grisly plastic surgery scene.
In tragic American fashion, Ashley wonders in Episode 4, as she is about to undergo a procedure she cannot do without, “Is this part of the deductible?” The OR staff responds, efficiently, “That’s a billing question.” Adding to the show’s unnerving atmosphere is the lighting, often forebodingly dark or artificially bright. Indeed, some of the most visceral scenes take place under the fluorescent lights of inescapable hospital operating and emergency rooms.
Season two begins with Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Miller (Charles Melton), a young couple, stumbling upon an ugly argument between Josh Martin (Oscar Isaac) and his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan). The Martins are the bosses at an exclusive California country club for the super-rich. Like the road-rage incident that kicks off Beef’s season one, the initial domestic fight cascades into consequences so far beyond the instigating event that it is as funny as it is scary.
Beef sharply observes and portrays its characters’ relationship dramas: a disagreement over the mulch is not just a disagreement over the mulch, just as a quarrel over the dog is not just a quarrel over the dog. Small tensions become existential threats, bearing the weight of history and meaning, making them dense and thus, intense.
Indeed, Beef is riddled with relationship, class, and generational anxieties. It’s Gen Z couple buzzes with the angry idealism of young adults trying to find a secure social and financial footing, while its Millennial and Gen X characters radiate with anger at falling behind and at their own needs (to throw off a mountain of debt, to realize their dreams).
Only the boomers of the show, notably Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and certain private club members, appear to be above it all. Maintaining that removed appearance, however, is costly. Chairwoman Park wishes aloud that kiwis had more “crunch”, like a pear, as her counsel tries to turn her attention toward a real crisis that she dismissively calls her husband’s “drama”. The detachment that money and power buy the older, more secure couples is no passive thing ; it is a violent force that bends others to their will.
As the show progresses, the characters’ unguarded, true nature begins to emerge. Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley achieves this to frightening effect, her voice chipper, but we see daggers in her eyes. Indeed, Spaeny stands out in her performance of vulnerability and wrath in equal measure through her slight voice and frame. She presents as soft and feminine, but her presence is like a heavy white fog that blankets the cliff that drops away just inches in front of you: she is fabulously treacherous.
Chairwoman Park calls capitalism a “system of nature”, likening it to evolution and survival of the fittest. To the chairwoman, everything, including relationships, is a commodity that can be bought and then disposed of when it’s no longer wanted. Indeed, she and the others go the way of this brutal social Darwinism, doing whatever it takes – no matter who it hurts– to stay on top of the pile.
Beef may be underpinned by anxiety, anger, and class tension, but the force that finally leaves its mark on this series is, surprisingly, love. On a revelatory drug trip that acts as a turning point, Josh laments, “There’s so much love on the other side, I just don’t know how to get there.” Ironically, he begins acting out of love and, in the process, finds it.
In our capitalist system, where survival might mean choosing to abandon, betray, and waylay others, Beef quietly raises essential questions. Will we ever learn to take care of each other? Will we ever become good to our fellow person whom we deem of no benefit? Or is there no limit to the harm we might do to another when we’re under pressure?