David Farnor | On 16, Jan 2024

Meet-cutes. Who doesn’t love a meet-cute? Even before The Holiday introduced the term to the masses, meet-cutes have always been something to dream of. But what if a meet-cute was a meet-ugly? That’s where Beef begins – and it’s an ugly, gripping, masterful, ugly mess.

Steven Yeun stars as Danny, a handyman desperately trying to make ends meet as jobs dry up – and the fact that he also has his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), to support, with his parents back home in Korea, only adds to the pressure on him.

Ali Wong also stars as Amy, who owns hipster homeware shop Kōyōhaus – and is hoping to sell up to snooty businesswoman Jordan (Maria Bello) so that she can maintain her family’s well-off lifestyle. Already feeling like she’s sacrificed too much for her husband, George (Joseph Lee), and their daughter, June (Remy Holt), she’s feeling the pressure in a different way to Danny, but with no less intensity.

So when the two of them almost collide in a car park, it’s the last straw for both of them – and road rage ensues. The fact that they don’t even hit each other at first makes their anger alarming enough, but then they continue to spiral into a cycle of revenge and hatred that becomes all-consuming. Danny infiltrates her home and wees all over her floor. Amy graffitis his truck. By the time arson is in the mix, things get uncomfortable – and that’s only a few episodes in.

Showrunner Lee Sung Jin brilliantly twists and warps the characters’ sense of what’s right, to the point where we’re both shocked by their actions and determined to see what will happen next. There’s a volatility to their pure resentment that is so raw and unpredictable that it’s utterly magnetic viewing.

This wouldn’t work without two cracking central performances, and Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are absolutely stellar. Yeun has a hangdog weariness that makes him sympathetic even as he’s petulent to the point of toxicity – there’s a vulnerability to his lone wolf, right down to his fake smiles and refusal to open up about his feelings. Wong, meanwhile, is almost manic in her false happiness, barely surpressing her growing frustration as Jordan makes her jump through hoops.

Both of them don’t feel good enough, or feel that other people think they’re good enough, and their mutual lack of self-worth and appreciation makes for a wonderfully sad and painful double-act. The complex nuances that linger beneath the surface could easily be missed as the episodes hurtle by in 30-minute instalments, but the scripts gently explore how privilege, class and race can all feed into one’s social position and sense of identity.

As every half-hour ups the ante, the duo become more and more enmeshed in each other’s lives, with the stakes for their loved ones growing higher all the time. And yet even as they become appalling people, they maintain enough humanity to ensure that Beef remains a tragedy rather than a horror story. In a fragmented world where tolerance, empathy and patience can often be in short supply, Beef is a timely, urgent reminder of the importance of listening to others. It’s a fast, relentless, meaty bit of TV. Sink your teeth in immediately.

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