Beef - Season 1

We all have a bad day sometimes, just like some frustration in traffic. However, Beef takes that fact to a higher level! Danny Cho (Steven Yeun, The Walking Dead) is having a bad day when he tries to return some items and turns out he didn't bring the receipt. When he wants to drive back home in his car, he almost crashes into another car. What follows are two drivers who clearly indicate in gesture what they think of each other and a wonderfully over-the-top chase in which they do not want to be inferior to each other.



Once home, Danny finds out who the driver of the other car is and decides to pay Amy Lau (Ali Wong, American Housewife) a visit. From that moment on, both Danny and Amy are determined to make each other's lives miserable and they will use everything to make fun of the other. That starts relatively innocently with urinating on the floor and giving bad online reviews, but quickly escalates so that their immediate environment also falls victim to it.

Danny and Amy are two completely different people, but they have in common that - each in their own way - they are both deeply unhappy with their lives and cannot express it very well.

It sounds like a comedy, but the series is clearly not a comedy. Beef is also not so much a series about 'road rage', but more a series that portrays two people who cannot live up to the expectations that they themselves and the outside world have of them and have become stuck in it. The mishap in the car is then the flame with which everything is set on fire and with which they suddenly have an outlet for their frustrations. The gate is therefore off the dam and both of them are no longer able to close this gate again.

The fact that this remains interesting for ten episodes is mainly due to the structure of the series, the characters and the fact that the evil plans often turn out differently than you expect. Danny and Amy are two completely different people, but they have in common that - each in their own way - they are both deeply unhappy with their lives and cannot express it very well. And as the series progresses you find out more and more how they got to this point in their lives.



You don't easily empathize with both characters, but they are excellently portrayed by Yeun and Wong. Where Yeun occasionally manages to arouse some sympathy for Danny, who nevertheless specializes in creating messes around him and does not turn his hand to the necessary manipulation, the contained anger in Amy, played by Wong, is sometimes through felt across the screen.

Anyway, I enjoyed Beef. A series in which the insiders among us will recognize some things now and then, which is wonderfully absurd at times, but certainly has a serious undertone.