According to showrunner Lee Sung Jin, Beef was always meant to be an anthology. That makes a lot of sense in hindsight, as its first season explored the fullest extent of a road rage incident with its foot on the proverbial gas pedal. There was nowhere further for its central characters to go, because Lee — with help from Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier — already took them there. But there will always be more “beef” to explore, and so the writer-director duo has reteamed with A24 and Netflix to bring us a very different, but no less explosive, take on the term.
“We wanted the feeling of this season’s beef to be a bit more passive-aggressive,” Lee recently told Tudum. “It’s more about the internal repression of rage that you see in the workplace.”
Beef Season 2 also casts a wider web, laying out a conflict between a young, newly-engaged couple and their well-to-do superiors. When Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) catch their boss Josh (Oscar Isaac) in a heated fight with his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), the once clear-cut balance of power between them threatens to topple entirely. But they’re not the only ones on a collision course this season: Beef also taps two legendary South Korean actors to complicate this quiet class war, setting the stage for a more complex take on Beef Season 1’s generational disparity.
While Ashley and Austin enter a kind of power play with Josh and Lindsay, they each have another boss to answer to. Minari’s Youn Yuh Jung is Chairwoman Park, the billionaire owner of the country club on which they all work — and the act of courting her approval is the thread that unites these disparate couples. Beef Season 2 adds more drama into the mix by casting Parasite star Song Kang-ho as the chairwoman’s second husband, a doctor embroiled in a scandal that could destroy everything she’s built.
Between a Gen Z couple that “have never been tested,” a shrewder Millennial pairing, and the Boomers at the top of the food chain, the new season of Beef is shaping up to be a whole lot more ambitious than its predecessor. Its first trailer doesn’t give us much by way of plot details, but fans fortunately don’t have to wait long to dive into another explosive battle of wills.
