Anger is the cornerstone of Beef, a tense, thrilling, ten-episode series on Netflix, at least at first. It’s in a clenched fist, in a prolonged sigh, in a frustrated middle-finger gesture that descends into an all-out war. It fuels and corrodes its characters in equal measure. The first episode, with its slow zoom-ins precipitating an explosion, is a masterful study of thwarted rage and how cathartic it can be to finally erupt. Beef captures life as one big anxiety spiral, a never-ending carousel of problems designed to tick you off.
Any number of films and TV shows pivot on an anger towards the system, but the show stands out for how it marinates in the daily irritants — a forgotten receipt, a passive-aggressive in-law. By the time Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong) find themselves in a knock-down-drag-out road-rage incident, it’s just another outcome of all the anger they’ve been unable to process so far, all the stressors for which they haven’t found a release valve. Neither of them can be the bigger person, having been made to feel so small and ineffectual already in the face of life’s many nagging worries, its mundane everyday stresses. The show takes anger, an emotion as old as time, and roots it even more urgently in the current moment — an era that sells us on the ease of being able to have anything we want, only countered by our frustration at being unable to.
It’s also a vicious cycle. Anger in Beef is also generational. One immigrant finds himself shouldering the weight of his parents’ ambitions alongside his own, another worries about passing down her trauma to her young daughter, who’s already started to show signs of anxiety. They’re both frustrated by the reality of their lives, they’re both stuck maintaining the illusion of them. It’s not lost on viewers that both their jobs — he’s a contractor, she owns a plant business — involve fixing and nurturing. Even so, their brief interaction seeps into their soul like a rot, poisoning everything else they touch.