Season 2 Review: A Solid Comeback with Room for Improvement

The season’s first half shines by maintaining a concentrated focus on the dynamics between the two central couples, allowing for a nuanced exploration of their relationships and socioeconomic standings. Josh and Lindsay’s marriage is strained, marked by Josh’s multiple OnlyFans subscriptions and Lindsay’s flirtatious texting, yet each heated argument brings a moment of clarity. In contrast, Ashley and Austin, engaged after just 18 months together and yet to experience conflict, face scrutiny from Lindsay, who questions the health of a relationship devoid of disagreement. Her comments lead Austin into a silent turmoil as he seeks conflict to test the strength of his relationship.

This sophomore outing of his darkly comic thriller series shifts its focus from generational trauma to generational class warfare. Struggling Gen-Z couple Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton) go up against Ashley’s boss Josh, who’s an affluent elder Millennial country club manager (played by Oscar Isaac), and his upper class British wife (Carey Mulligan’s Lindsay) after they witness the older couple in a violent domestic dispute. Secretly recording the tense fight, the late-20s couple soon realizes they’re sitting on a gold mine; Ashley doesn’t have health insurance and needs urgent surgery if the pair is going to have kids, and without a high school diploma, this is her most viable career path.

Reluctantly agreeing so his reputation isn’t ruined, Josh agrees to give her a new office job — and, quickly realizing she’s dreadful at the paperwork, cooks up his own plan to embezzle money from the new Korean parent company by messing up invoices by insignificant amounts, with the perfect fall guy to blame if he’s caught out. What he hasn’t factored in is that the new chairwoman (Youn Yuh-Jung) is also using the country club’s accounting as a means of hiding a potential scandal back at home that risks engulfing her surgeon husband’s (Song Kang-ho) career. This builds into a final stretch that becomes full-blown corporate espionage thriller — and while it never stops being a lot of fun, it can’t help but feel a little too over-the-top when placed next to a first season that explored the ramifications of a dispute between strangers in ways that remained as grounded as they were unexpected.

The first half of the season, which keeps its focus squarely on the two central couples and not a wider web of late capitalist backstabbing, is easily the strongest as it welcomes interrogations of both relationships as well as their places on the financial ladder. Josh and Lindsay have been married for several years and haven’t been passionate in nearly as long, the former with multiple OnlyFans subscriptions and the latter constantly toying with sending flirty texts to other men, but each impassioned argument ends with a moment of clarity. Ashley and Austin are engaged despite only being together for 18 months, and have never argued, something Lindsay brings up as a sign of an unhealthy relationship when Austin visits the next day to see if he should call for help — isn’t it far less healthy to always be on the same page? It’s an observation that sends Austin spiraling in silence, desperate to find conflict where there isn’t any to test the strength of a relationship he’d never called into question.

All four leads are exceptional, but Charles Melton is given the strongest material to work with. Not uncoincidentally, it’s the material that hews thematically closest to the first season’s exploration of the contemporary Korean diaspora as he gets his own job promotion at the country club and begins to spend more time around Korean people, something he never experienced growing up in Arizona. Kids there assumed he was Mexican, and his own fiancée admits to never quite realizing that she’s in an interracial relationship, which all helps to manifest his season-long internal crisis, constantly second-guessing whether he wants to start a family or if he wants to explore his own cultural identity, the two ideas presenting themselves to him as mutually exclusive.

On the other side of the divide, Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac once again prove they have incredible chemistry when playing couples teetering on the abyss, after previously co-starring in “Drive” and “Inside Llewyn Davis” in either violent relationships or as exes with no love lost between them. It’s Isaac who gets the more deserving showcase, especially after years where it’s felt like Hollywood has had no idea what to do with him, either underused or distractingly miscast whenever he does appear in a high-profile role (his performance as Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s recent gothic epic might be the worst leading turn in any best picture nominated movie in the past decade). Here, he brings life to a new archetype we’ll be seeing more of in the coming years: the Millennial male midlife crisis, with his own relationship troubles matched only by his lack of a purpose.

One minute, he’s making plans to embezzle money and start a new bed-and-breakfast music venue; the next he’s in his man cave playing around with a Moog synthesizer and dreaming of making music again, or losing thousands of dollars to Michael Phelps around the poker table. And even then, the series still takes time to reassert that this is as comfortable a midlife crisis as you can have — where you can be in the same social circles as Olympic athletes, or have friends with enough money to hire Hot Chip to play a concert and bring you on stage to play synth with them, just to make you feel better. It’s a level of wealth unthinkable to most in their generation; the Gen-Z couple referring to them as “boomers” isn’t a joke so much as it is an acknowledgement that they have financial stability that feels alien for a Millennial to have.

The final stretch of the season takes things in a Coen Brothers inspired direction – Lee Sung Jin has labeled their 2008 comedy “Burn After Reading” one of his primary influences – as miscommunication and escalating idiocy by all parties plays out on a global scale. It’s consistently entertaining thanks to four very well drawn characters at the center, who aren’t simplistic generational stereotypes but view each other as such; the show just begins to lack the same satirical insight as it shifts gears away from the ramifications of their small-scale disputes into espionage thriller pastiche. It’s a weaker season than the first but no less watchable, anchored by performances just as strong as Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s commanding leads there. If we can go back to smaller scale character drama next time, the series will be much stronger for it.

“Beef” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.