Netflix’s latest series is already making waves with viewers, achieving a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Arriving on the streaming website on Wednesday (6 April), Beef is a dark comedy produced by A24. It stars Minari actor Steven Yeun and comedian Ali Wong as two strangers who get into a road-rage accident.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Beef has a 99 per cent score at the time of writing on the critic-supported Tomatometer, as well as a 96 per cent score based on audience reviews.
Critics have praised both the show’s writing and performances (by Yeun and Wong), suggesting Beef is a shoo-in for this year’s Emmy Awards.
Writing for Salon, Melanie McFarland said: “One day in the future academics may view Beef as a convincing TV distillation of the early 21st-century’s collective mood, a lingering and worsening state of society-wide pandemic anger.
“Hyperbolic? Maybe. But I challenge you to find another series that channels the spectrum of fury as wildly, beautifully and crazily while, for the most part, maintaining its focal clarity.”
On RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico wrote: “Steven Yeun is quite simply one of the best actors of his generation, and he makes so many fascinating decisions here.
“Wong matches Yeun beat-for-beat from the first episode to last. It’s easily the best acting work of her career, and I hope it opens dozens of doors for her in terms of future collaborations.”
British GQ’s Jack King, meanwhile, said that Beef was Netflix’s best new show since Squid Game.
“Thank god, then, for Steven Yeun — an evergreen statement if I’ve ever seen it — and Beef, a Russian Doll-esque return to form for the streamer’s original programming, and unequivocally the best new series they’ve released since 2020’s Squid Game,” King wrote.
“Riding the welcome wave of new Asian-American media emerging over the last couple of years… Beef is an inventive drama-comedy from mega-hip studio A24, 10 30-minute episodes spun from an incident of quintessentially LA road rage.”
Beef is on Netflix now.
