Netflix’s Beef lets its cast be assholes for the whole season

Netflix Series Beef This spiral is one of cataclysmic existential despondency and self destruction. The story begins with a simple traffic incident: Danny Cho’s (Steven Yeun), driving his old red pickup truck, nearly runs over a white SUV. The horns are honked and words yelled. Middle fingers were extended. It’s the sort of conflict where the participants tend to go on with their lives once they’ve let off some steam.

But for Danny and the unseen SUV driver, there’s still quite a lot of steam to let off. Danny chases the SUV, weaving around red lights and stopping signs as his opponent pelts garbage on his windshield. The confrontation ends and we can see Amy Lau, played by Ali Wong. She’s a hard-working entrepreneur about to cash in on her successful business.

Characters in Beef The characters aren’t innocent victims, who end up learning a valuable lesson. It is okay for them to be cruel, selfish and petty. We rarely see this in white-centered fiction. And their actions take on an interesting additional layer when viewed in context with the Asian American Identity that unites Asian Americans across class and cultural lines.

In essence, the series is an extreme interpretation of something Amy’s touchy-feely husband George (Joseph Lee) says: You never know what the other person is going through. Danny, a struggling handyman who lives in the former motel that his family owned along with his lazily behaving brother Paul (Young Mazino), is an aspiring writer. George has a point in that Amy and Danny see each other as an object of their anger, rather than as individuals with feelings and lives. Of course, he’s also ignoring the fact that Danny tracked Amy down in the aftermath, cajoled his way into her home, and maliciously peed all over her bathroom.

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Netflix

Beef It allows its Asian Americans to be anything other than polite. We watch the imperfect coping mechanisms they’ve developed, like masturbating with a gun or inhaling a distressing amount of Burger King. And then we see how, in painting one another as an unambiguous enemy, they find an outlet for the emotions they’ve spent so much of their lives holding in.

When Danny comes home to the cramped room he shares with Paul, he rants about the expectation to take “other people’s shit” with a smile. It’s a quality that, as an actor, Steven Yeun has built a recent career on expressing: the buried hurt of his traumatized ex-child actor in NopeThe simmer of socialpathy Burning. There is more to him than the persona he shows the world. He conveys something more going on beneath the face he presents to the world. Beef, Danny can’t be honest even when he’s otherwise being open about how he feels — he lies to his brother that he scared off the white SUV and “won” the confrontation, and he spends much of the series making tiny excuses as if by instinct. (“I did chest yesterday,” by way of explanation for being outlifted by the plainly more athletic Paul.)

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Netflix

In Amy, too, we see the things she must ignore and the performance she must give, which similarly dovetails with Ali Wong’s own career: She’s essentially struggling to keep burying her outspoken comic persona. Her interactions with Jordan (Maria Bello), the prospective buyer for her company, are loaded with casual racism that she smiles through, like when she’s praised for her “zen Buddhist” vibe. Amy views the sale of her business as a means to escape such maintenance and allow her focus on her daughter. But even in her personal life, she goes unheard — George cuts her off before she can even explain the road rage incident.

The characters are able to trace the repression of their parents back in some way. Amy says as much about her quiet Midwestern upbringing, whereas Danny notes that he, as the eldest son, shouldered the bulk of his parents’ demands. In many Asian American tales, the main characters are hampered by generational conflict. But repression is as much heaped upon them through the societal stereotype of the model minority, the ones who keep their heads down and never make a fuss — the very behavior that Danny rages against in the first episode, and the very expectation that countless You can also read about the advantages of usingian Americans are confronted with throughout their lives.

As Beef’s conflict spirals out of control, it places its characters in a pantheon of TV antiheroes. Its characters’ self-actualization and collateral damage play like low-stakes games. Breaking BadThe pettiness of the drug dealers is not hidden by the drama. Amy and Danny are characters we can relate to, sometimes even cheering them on. Beef It is possible to access that empathy even if the characters are not particularly likeable or sympathetic. By giving characters depth and revealing their humanity, the series breaks stereotypes. Humanity, BeefIt is messy, angry, imperfect, and often happens.

They are not acquitted by the context and history of the hurt they caused, nor do their unsavory qualities diminish. Danny’s interactions with Amy are pervaded by oblivious chauvinism, first imagining that only George could be his adversary and then labeling her a bored housewife leeching off her husband’s “art money.” And Amy, for her part, is hardly deterred by the vast income gap that divides her and Danny — she paints “I AM POOR” on the side of his truck and tanks the reviews for his floundering construction business. After she follows him to the motel she is ecstatic that she did not see him as a homeowner.

For as intense as the specific rivalry is here, there’s also a universal truth to their struggles, in the catharsis of expression. The expression of their struggles is universal. Beef As the story continues, we see that Danny is not the only character who has been beaten by expectations. George’s father is an internationally renowned sculptor. However, his work shows no talent or success, so Amy has to support the family. Paul laments the fact that older generations tend to pass on their insecurities and hang-ups onto younger ones. They, too, are products of neglected emotion; when Amy and Danny manipulate them to their own ends, Paul and George taste some of the validation they’ve never clearly received from their own loved ones.

Asian Americans are now playing roles that were previously thought impossible, such as love interests or superheroes. It’s BeefThe film does, however, clear up a crucial hurdle for the movie: it lets both its main characters and their peripherals be complex, messy, or even unambiguous scumbags.