Beef: Season 2

11

It took me a minute to tune in to the first season of Beef. Something about the screaming tenor of the thing outlined in the trailer just felt non-essential to me while I already lived it every day on the streets of urban NJ. I eventually relented, and it was a more interesting and crazy show than I had originally clocked. But it wasn’t something I was eager to re-live. And then along comes the second season of this anthology series and, once again, I was less than interested in what it had to say. But, quite frankly, we ran out of viable programming in our queue and figured the cast alone might pull this thing along. And, let me tell you, if you thought season one of Beef was wacky, this one just spins completely off the rails in a very eye-popping way. I’m not sure what show they thought they were making, but it seemed like a weird game of one-upmanship with The White Lotus that is just a class above where this series can reach.

The first thing that hit my senses with a bit of a clunk was the really obvious product placement in the first episode. In fact, it felt like the showrunner was faced with the list of products they had to subtly plug and just stuck them right there in the forefront in a giant spate of commercialism. Maybe there is some underlying social commentary here, but I was almost waiting for one of the characters to turn to camera, hold up a bottle of Aquaphor and just extoll its skin-smoothing qualities in a 30-second commercial. It wasn’t a great start and added to the awkward clumsiness that this thing displayed out of the gate. It felt like it was grinding its gears trying to slip into first for longer than you’d expect a professional production to do. I understand there is supposed to be some unease built into this show — a cringe factor that feels more forced than earned — but my unease came more from the wonkiness of the dialogue and character interactions than from the intended narrative.

The second thing that really hit me is that everyone on this show is an idiot. Like literal morons. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but all of the main characters are particularly stupid. Oscar Isaac’s character, Joshua Martín, is the general manager of a hoity-toity country club. He thinks he’s smart, but he’s a complete moron. His wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (Carey Mulligan), who is an aspiring interior decorator, also thinks she’s smart, but is also really dumb — and is a garbage interior decorator. Country club employee and high-school dropout, Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny), somehow thinks she’s smart, but she is the ultimate dummy. Her fiancee, Austin Davis (Charles Melton), who is a former Butkus Award winner, pretty much understands his intellectual limitations and lives up to his self-aware stupidity. We’re supposed to see the parallels between this older couple whose marriage is at a crossroads and this younger couple whose life together is just starting off. Which I supposed is made easier when they are all in the same boat of stupid. I think the intention is to make the characters more realistic by making them inept and clueless and, especially in the case of the unintentionally awful Ashley, pretty terrible lying liars. But perhaps it’s just poor writing.

The main issue here is that there is no clear idea of what the hell is going on. There is this framework of the two couples and their trajectories — added later with an even older Korean couple that feels entirely bolted on — but little else to bolster a season of television. Josh and Lindsay’s marriage is clearly falling apart. They live together, but are estranged physically and mentally. Josh’s life is running around the country club, basically acting as its rich members’ fixer and arranger. He has dedicated his life to making them happy. While he burns cash on OnlyFans, I guess? That whole line of exploration goes nowhere and I think was just done so we can cringe at Oscar Isaac jerking it to computer light. Again, he’s a moron. And his wife is busy teasing dudes via text and lusting after the young tennis pro who is only trying to coax her into spending money she doesn’t have on plastic surgery in Korea. It’s nonsense. The two couples’ lives intersect when Lindsay — who, again, is one of the dumbest characters to grace the small screen in some time — films Josh and Lindsay in a compromising position and blackmails him into giving her a better job at the club than her current role as cart girl. Josh, the dummy, quickly realizes that Ashley is even dumber than him, and takes advantage of her stupidity to start to embezzle from the club in order to make up the shortfall in cashflow for him and Lindsay. But, being the dummy he is, he totally botches it and is easily caught and is, in turn, used as a dupe for a bigger embezzlement scheme by the club’s new Korean owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung).

You got all that? Stupid people blackmailing stupid people, none of whom quite realize how dumb they are and whom ultimately fall under the thumb of a smarter person with more brains and way more money. Meanwhile, Ashley presses her relationship with Austin, Josh and Lindsay’s relationship further frays and everything spirals into an uncomfortable ball of nonsense that leads to shootouts and what feels like a fever dream of a script that had absolutely no idea where it was headed from minute one. All while the show’s creators thought they were making some deep statement of generational repetition and the circle of life and probably something buddhist or something. But the issue is that this is still a television show that has to make sense and follow some sort of logical plotting. There are scenes in this show that feel like the characters are dreaming because they’re so out-of-the-blue, but are, in fact, supposed to be happening in reality. For some reason Josh is obsessed with the band Hot Chip. Which is a really fucking weird thing to be obsessed with. But at some juncture he gets on a plane with a rich club member he’s friendly with and shows up at a party where, voila, his favorite band of all time, Hot Chip, happens to be playing. And from the stage, the band shouts him out and invites him on stage to play the keyboard or something. The thing is, the show uses dream and hallucination mechanisms elsewhere in the show, but this is not, in fact, a dream or a hallucination. It just seems like maybe the show creator is buddies with the guys from Hot Chip, so they stuck in this completely unrealistic IRL Josh experience for… no reason. There is a scene where Lindsay — again, played by 95-pound-soaking-wet Carey Mulligan — suplexes and murders a coyote with her bare hands. It’s not a metaphor or an imagined interaction. Nope, it actually happens. And it’s weird in a not-great way. These types of unrealistic and confounding things continue to take place throughout the season and left me shaking my head and wondering if perhaps, like Josh, I too had taken Bufo (a psychedelic derived from the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad) and my reality was now forever changed. Yes, this drug-trip episode trope also happens.

This disjointed narrative continues, yet I hoped things would somehow work themselves out. I don’t think we’re supposed to like these characters, but I definitely didn’t. Eh, Melton’s character is semi-likable, but looking at his mustache on that face did turn me against him just a bit. The issue with this, however, is that the show’s writers decided the ending of the season was to be treated as though this was Six Feet Under. Like we’d been watching and laughing and grieving with these characters for five seasons. It’s not at all earned, and I don’t care about these awful people. So, the whole overwrought ending may be well-crafted here and there, but the impact is completely muted by the fact nothing leading up to it is emotionally impactful. This wrap-up is functionally executed using an eight-year time jump, which arbitrarily shows where all of our characters have ended up. Lindsay’s situation especially makes no sense math-wise — at least without just the smallest amount of explanation that we don’t get. Just the tiniest amount of dialogue to explain the possible math anomaly would have helped, but nah. It also undoes several of the stakes and actions of Lindsay and Austin. That hand sanitizer in the jizz cup just wiped off the board. There are also some other points of stress and peril that just kind of go away in one fell swoop — or one eight-year wipe. And we never find out what ends up happening with Burberry 2.0. Burberry 1.0 being the catalyst for the final demise of Lindsay and Josh’s relationship. Josh drops him with his sister, apparently, but c’mon, people, how do you not give the dog a final story? There is also this ant motif through the season that I think they think is clever, but it’s not. I kind of see what they were going for here, but they clearly based the season on a philosophy that was not defined clearly enough in the text of the show. So we end up with a rudderless attempt at a cerebral concept filled with dumbshits.