There’s a lot to love about Beef, the new A24/Netflix show (out Thursday) you’re going to spend the next few weeks hearing about, but one of my favourites is how clearly and surely it looks LA in the eye. We all know the facts: there are only three cities in the world, and those are LA, London and New York. I have never heard of another city in my entire life. And in recent years, TV shows that set themselves in these places (so: 95% of all TV shows) have been knowingly shy about it, as if they are an Oxford undergraduate refusing to admit their dad is rich: yes, these shows say, yes we are in London. But look! We’re not in the posh or obvious bits, alright! Look, here’s Victoria Park! Here’s Larry’s in Peckham! Didn’t expect that, did you?
Beef is not like this. The central, well, beef – down-on-his-luck handyman Steven Yeun and up-on-her-luck-but-unsatisfied-anyway plant artist Ali Wong get into a road rage altercation that overtakes both of their lives (what a pitch!) – is completely of and informed by LA, a city that can only be navigated angrily in a car. On the side of Wong’s Amy, there’s a perfect lampooning of luxe-hippy culture: dinner club mushroom trips, vaping weed cross-legged in a business meeting before perusing a panic room catalogue, big floppy hats and beautiful cardigans, intimacy exercises, thinking your toddler is an artist, extremely expensive chairs.
Yeun’s Danny lives in the flipside of a divided city: having a cousin you can’t really trust, outdoor weightlifting, flickering motel lights and wonky signage, cash-in-hand jobs, having the main thing you own be a van from 2006, fast food for most meals and not really knowing what your credit score is, trying to find absolution in the church. When they collide in the opening scenes – and devolve into the resulting beef that guides and energises them both throughout the series – you see two people at the end of two very different sets of nerves, both powered by the same fuel.
If that sounds exhausting, it isn’t. Beef, despite the name and all the promotional shots of Wong and Yeun screaming at each other, rarely descends into unnecessary yelling (something has happened to me over the past couple of years where I don’t really enjoy watching people yell on TV now. It’s made watching It’s Always Sunny … quite tricky.) Instead, what it does is so much subtler and cleverer: the initial beef splinters through their lives like a chip in the windshield, becoming an obsession for both of them. We see the many complex and cultural layers to their family dynamics. We see how Wong’s by-the-book perfect life just isn’t hitting the way it should, and how Yeun’s do-what-his-parents-say version isn’t working out, either. We see some incredibly interesting new methods of getting revenge. There are a lot of fascinating ideas about old friendships, and family duty, and doing things right but not necessarily doing things for you, and all of that is contrasted so perfectly with the high spikes of psychotic behaviour they enact upon each other. They’re not just mad at each other, they’re mad at everything. And if slashing someone’s tyres or ruining their aggregate Yelp review score helps alleviate that, so be it.
Yeun – who has immaculate taste in projects, going from The Walking Dead to Minari to I Think You Should Leave’s receipt sketch – has said that over the course of production, the crew started to refer to Beef as “dumb Heat”. And you can see three crucial similarities between Michael Mann’s essential 1995 blokecore masterpiece and this 10-part black comedy series: a central antagonistic relationship that lights both participants up with a new kind of energy, the hazy backdrop of beautiful LA, and some really interesting stuff with guns.
Beef isn’t afraid to go to dark, weird places, it looks beautiful doing it and the episode titles read like a poem (when the opening titles for the first episode roared on to the screen – a smudgy modernist piece with the words The Birds Don’t Sing, They Screech in Pain stretched taut over it – I literally said, out loud: “This is so cool”). We’ve had a good few weeks of TV, now the post-Christmas lull and the award-season pause is out of the way – The White Lotus became The Last of Us which segued neatly into Succession which can go back-to-back with this – but I truly think Beef might turn out to be one of the most interesting shows of the year.
