Beef Butchers the One Percent

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The second season of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef explores the dark side of wealth and privilege at a California country club. The show portrays a world where rich members feel entitled to do anything they want, and the owners readily dismiss the ambitions of their staff. Various schemes and exploitations are rampant, preying on people’s desires for things like wealth and happiness. What’s missing, however, is any genuine search for meaning or peace. Beef doesn’t imply its wealthy characters would even want inner peace, or know what to do with it, when they’re so focused on leisure and abusing their power.

Initially, Beef focused on the escalating conflict sparked by a road-rage incident. However, the show has evolved into an anthology series that explores the underlying reasons for people’s behavior and how factors like wealth and social barriers can lead us to lose ourselves. This thematic focus will resonate with viewers of The White Lotus, and the new season, which centers on the interconnected lives of those at an exclusive country club, will inevitably draw comparisons. But Beef arguably handles the issue of class disparity more effectively than the later seasons of The White Lotus. Unlike that show, the country club in Beef isn’t a temporary escape – it represents the entirety of the characters’ worlds. And this new storyline is even more unpredictable, snobbish, romantic, and brilliantly, satisfyingly angry than the already intense first season.

Both millennials and Gen Z are criticized in the new season of Beef, but the real focus is on the wealthy one percent – those obsessed with money and willing to sacrifice their values to get it. The show explores how money impacts relationships, particularly romantic ones, through the stories of three couples: a married couple in their 40s (Josh and Lindsay), a couple in their 20s who are engaged (Austin and Ashley), and a billionaire couple (Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim). Beef questions what truly motivates love and how easily it can turn to hatred. The first season delved into the experiences of first-generation immigrant families and the anxieties of leaving home. This season continues to examine themes of stagnation and self-destruction in relationships, but expands its scope to include issues like the power of shared ethnicity, generational misunderstandings, and the endless, and ultimately empty, chase for wealth and meaning. As a result, this season of Beef feels more ambitious, complex, and intellectually stimulating than the first.

Beef’s Monte Vista Point is located near the towns of Ojai and Montecito, California – places known for being both liberal and surprisingly private. These are the kinds of communities where wealth is abundant, but simple tasks, like picking oranges, often go undone. Josh has managed the club there for years, building relationships with the wealthy clientele as they spend lavishly. He’s even befriended some of them, like Troy, who owns a private jet. Josh came from a difficult background, and this job has allowed him to build a ‘man cave’ filled with sports memorabilia and pursue his musical ambitions with a Minimoog synthesizer. However, his wife, Lindsay, a British interior designer who once dated royalty, isn’t as impressed with their lifestyle. Her dissatisfaction with Josh has grown over time, mirroring her obsession with throw pillows – so many, in fact, that they fill an entire shed on their property.

The season starts with a fierce and explosive fight between Isaac and Mulligan, who previously portrayed a more subdued, troubled couple in Drive. They unleash a torrent of anger at each other, with Lindsay attacking Josh for his unreliability and delusional belief that people care about him, while Josh ridicules Lindsay’s arrogance and blames her for his problems. The argument escalates quickly – Lindsay confesses she hates Josh, and he responds by saying he’s relieved they never had children, prompting her to attack him with a golf club. This intense and painful scene is made even more complicated by the unexpected arrival of Austin and Ashley, Josh’s colleagues, who return his wallet. They witness what appears to be Josh assaulting Lindsay and decide to exploit the situation, offering to keep the video secret only if Josh and Lindsay meet their demands. Josh is desperate to prevent the club’s owner, Chairwoman Park, from seeing the footage and questioning her decision to let such a volatile and disrespectful man manage her property.

The show ‘Beef’ quickly establishes a complex web of power struggles and rivalry. A clear social hierarchy exists, with Chairwoman Park holding the most power, followed by Josh and Lindsay, and then Austin and Ashley. As Josh and Lindsay clash with Austin and Ashley, the series explores a world driven by limited resources and a competitive mindset. When Chairwoman Park begins making changes at the club, positions are shuffled, and Austin, who is half-Korean, is promoted over Ashley, despite her longer tenure, raising questions about fairness and priorities—particularly as Ashley wants to start a family. Lindsay is disappointed when Chairwoman Park dismisses her design ideas with a dismissive comment about her style. This leads to tension between Josh and Lindsay, as he questions the decision while also feeling resentful about shouldering most of their financial burden. The series also examines how the couples’ racial backgrounds—Josh and Austin are people of color, while Lindsay and Ashley are white—impact their relationships. Ultimately, ‘Beef’ asks whether any relationship can endure under the weight of financial and emotional debt, especially when a partner changes over time.

Lee tackles huge themes throughout the season with beautifully filmed scenes. These scenes skillfully reveal what motivates each character through thoughtful details and strong acting. A recurring image of marching ants feels a bit too on-the-nose as a metaphor, but the shifting relationships and conflicts between the younger couples are fascinating because they aren’t easily categorized. Everyone has understandable, and yet flawed, reasons to feel resentful, and watching these conflicting viewpoints unfold is like being caught in a chaotic bumper car ride – constantly bombarded from all sides. You’ll likely find yourself agreeing with whoever is speaking at the moment, until another character shares their perspective, and you’ll switch your allegiance. It’s often uncomfortable to watch, but incredibly powerful, and Lee consistently delivers scenes that are both unsettling and sharply ambiguous.

The show’s dramatic shifts in tone are brilliantly handled by the entire cast, who adapt their performances to match. One standout episode, set in a hospital, reimagines Ashley – previously unlikeable and lost – as a woman whose future is stolen by a system that punishes poverty. The actors Isaac and Mulligan deliver a powerful scene of mutual blame, showcasing the volatile relationship between their characters, who are quick to turn on each other but fiercely loyal when their bond is threatened. However, the season’s true standout is Melton, who plays a seemingly simple character with surprising depth. His character, Austin, begins as naive and sensitive, but becomes conflicted between a genuine connection to Korean culture and Ashley’s manipulative attempts to use his heritage for her own benefit. Melton conveys this internal struggle through subtle physical cues – a forced stillness and a fading smile – revealing Austin’s inability to be himself because of the people around him. This highlights a central theme of the show, Beef: how often we compromise who we are, believing it will improve our lives, only to find that it doesn’t.

This can all be grueling to watch, as the first season often was. And also like the first season, it can be outlandishly funny, with barbed observations that feel like Lee throwing punches willy-nilly in a bar fight. A neighbor complains to Josh about a “Hispanic” walking down the street and when he informs her that was him, she scoffs back, “You’re Greek” (a fun metatextual nod to Isaac’s “ethnically ambiguous” acting persona). Ashley embarrasses herself with a rambling attempt to compare the zero-to-ten pain scale with Letterboxd star ratings; Lindsay looks like a moron when she asks a lawyer for advice, then references talking to ChatGPT. Taken together, Beef seems to say all of these are representations of a culture so toxically individualistic and ambitious that its members can’t even fathom solidarity as an option to push back against a depraved ruling class. Everyone thinks their fortunes are just around the corner; everyone wants to be in the big club. It’s a Squid Game–esque idea and maybe it feels too titanic for Beef, a show that was once about a traffic incident at a home-improvement store. What Beef did so well in its first season, though, and does again here, is track how multifaceted our subjectivity is, and how our actions always have consequences we can’t quite anticipate, because everyone else has their own multifaceted subjectivity, too. All of us are alike and none of us are alike, and that fundamental truth about the human condition can apply to so much about how we choose to live. What if we realized our similarities could be used to better ourselves collectively? Why can’t we dream a shared dream that improves all of our circumstances? Beef’s answer isn’t necessarily a satisfying one, but it still gives you plenty to chew on.

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2026-04-16 19:59