4 out of 5

Created by: Lee Sung Jin

covers season 1

Given this show’s starting point and basic premise – a minor squabble between strangers Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong) results in a series of escalating aggressions and pranks toward / against one another – I was wondering if beloved indie production company A24 had jumped that inevitable shark which would find the company’s output consisting of pretty, but base, material. 

Meaning: was this just going to be a pretentiously presented Jackass, and the A24 banner gave critics the leniency to judge it otherwise? (I say this while acknowledging the mostly very positive reception the last Jackass movie received…) 

It pokes at that. Some of the humor in Beef is pretty childish, reveling in that place that Apatow comedies fiddle with, employing puerile stuff surrounded by dialogue and characters which help to prop it up. But Beef ends up “earning” its A24 pedigree while executing these same moves, until fully transitioning from broader comedy to something darker, poking at the spaces which might cause people to act like Danny and Amy in the first place. While sticking to this agenda, Beef is quite brilliant, drawing a line of human behavior that crosses from the pre-social media age (approximately that of our leads) to the eras before and after, and questioning how those inter-generational interactions are also affected… without necessarily dropping the shtick of Danny and Amy pranking one another. 

On a particularly fraught day for the duo, unknown to each other at this point, Danny is pulling out of a parking space while Amy is driving behind him; she honks, he honks, they flip each other the bird. And then Danny chases Amy down the road in his car, and across medians and through yards… 

This is comedy, told in that broad slapstick style where the events are actually pretty dangerous, but we’re meant to laugh.  

Danny complains about this to his seemingly simple-minded brother, Paul (Young Mazino), while Amy retreats to the relative security of her seemingly milquetoast husband, George (Joseph Lee) and daughter. But events align so that Danny and Amy can find one another, and let this representative-of-all-life’s-ills grudge grow. As their lives become more twistedly and twistingly intertwined, perspectives on the other’s life butts up against their hatred. 

Beef’s writers successfully boil this into noir territory, as bad decisions start requiring bigger lies, and financial and family woes plague both leads, in different – but similar – ways. 

It’s in service of this where some shakiness in the balance is introduced, as some characters remain one-beat jokes, and others get fleshed out, but still somewhat superficially. Most of this is targeted, though – the superficialities can help to underscore the lies Danny and Amy tell themselves; however, artiness eventually intercedes for the concluding episode, which seems like the show’s creators stretching for how to “conclude” an ongoing existential crisis… but maybe also leave things open for season 2. It’s not bad, but much less tonally confident than the build up that’s preceded. 

Still, I applaud any show / movie willing to linger in moral greys, and Beef’s slow shift from R-rated hijinks to a pretty heavy, very dark tragicomedy is, up to its final episode, rather masterful, supported by game performances from all its principles, willing to look quite unglamorous… but oh so human.