A24 has been dabbling in television for some time now (most notably with their hit HBO show Euphoria), but their latest foray onto the small screen, Netflix’s Beef, is one of their boldest and best yet. It tells the story of struggling contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) and ambitious entrepreneur Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and how their adversarial entanglement in an explosive road rage incident promptly gives way to their darkest impulses, anxieties, and woes. Beef is a maniacal, shocking, and fiendishly funny descent into raw (pun intended) emotion and pain. Spiritually successive of last year’s The Banshees of Inisherin but sung in the key of Bong Joon-ho, Beef is as absurd and hilarious as it is depressing and depraved, exhibiting the absolute worst of human pettiness with gleeful abandon.

The sheer craft on display in this operatic and absurdist tragicomedy is a consistently astonishing feat. All of the directors involved, from Hikari to Jake Schreier to Beef creator and writer Lee Sung Jin himself, have a strong handle on the unique tonal balance necessary for this show to work. They carry the film through uproarious comedy and guttural despair with the ease and agility you could would expect from a seasoned veteran of dark comedy like Bong Joon-ho or Martin McDonagh (hence my earlier comparisons). The way the series delivers razor sharp gags, unflinching emotional vulnerability, and agonizing moments of tension simply through its visual language and presentation is an endlessly admirable achievement.

Going hand in hand with the show’s brilliantly acute and versatile direction is its biting and often profound writing. It is no exaggeration to say this show is incredibly funny. The cutting one-liners, the outrageous physicality, the charismatic delivery; everything about this show screams master class in dark comedy. Even as the story journeys to shockingly dark and grisly places (even by dark comedy standards), the humor never lets up. The script really takes no issue with disturbing you and making you laugh in the same breath. In fact, it does so constantly. Few shows have mastered the ability to make you want to laugh, cry, and scream in fear all at once, but Beef joins these thin ranks with ease. Above all else, the teleplay pulls absolutely zero punches and goes all in on the comedic, tragic, and horrific with proportionate courage and adeptness.

The key to this show’s success, however, are the performances. There’s a rather expansive ensemble on display here, and everyone does a fantastic job in their respective roles, but this is, without a doubt, the Steven Yeun and Ali Wong show. Yeun is an excellent actor, and that is no secret in this day and age. He’s subtly unnerving in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018), tender and stoic in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020) (for which he became the first East Asian nominee in history in Lead Actor at the Oscars), and he makes the most of his limited screen time in Jordan Peele’s audacious Nope (2022). All that said, Beef is among his very best work as an actor. It’s right up there with Burning, which WAS his best work to date in my eyes, and honestly, part of me wonders if this is even better. Yeun is an incredible, underrated comedy actor. His delivery always comes with so much personality and casual charisma, yet it never feels corny or overdone no matter how outrageous the circumstances get (and this show can certainly get very outrageous). And as funny as Yeun is, he’s just as genuinely emotive, playing a down-on-his-luck contractor trying his best to support his recently misfortuned family and struggling with some very dark thoughts and feelings of his own. There is a specific scene where Danny is at church that absolutely floored me. Yeun has already done more than enough to make his incredible talent known, but there’s some scenes in here that are honestly on another level of virtuosity.

Not to be outdone by her costar, however, is Ali Wong. I’ve loved her as a comedian for years, and she was highly enjoyable in 2019’s Always Be My Maybe, but that was a relatively paint-by-numbers romcom. Beef is an entirely different beast of ultra-thematic and philosophical storytelling, yet Wong never misses a beat. This is far and away the most extraordinary work of her acting career so far, and she IS extraordinary, matching Yeun’s talent with impeccable ease. As always, she is an absolute riot to watch on screen, but she also leaves us with no shortage of genuine emotional impact. Just like Yeun’s Danny, Wong’s Amy is incredibly dissatisfied and overwhelmed with the existence she has made for herself, or perhaps the one society has prescribed for her. And Wong never once feels in over her head, conveying the show’s weighty emotion with genuine raw intensity and grounding naturalism. It’s truly wonderfully engaging to watch these two spar their way through their own internal and external struggles.

This show’s greatest achievement, however, is combining all of these amazing ingredients into a meditation on the human condition that’s as timeless as it is uniquely 2023. To some extent, we’re all petty creatures. Minor inconveniences can piss us off. Dodgy interactions with strangers in passing can convince us they’re narcissistic monsters out to ruin our day and our lives. Why is that? Beef takes a chance road rage incident and turns it into a resounding commentary on the philosophical and intrapersonal root of outward pettiness and cruelty. “Anger is simply a transitory state of consciousness,” the lead character herself says, but just how far will we let our own disillusionment in life drive our carnal impulses? Beef isn’t out for bare bones realism. Instead, it seeks the universality of human disillusionment in a story that just might come to real world fruition if we all gave way to our deepest and darkest urges. In a hypermodern world that overwhelms with its excess and seemingly endless possibilities, a thematic exploration such as this feels uniquely apt. And it’s incredibly thought-provoking to watch.

Though I have exclusively sung this show’s praises so far, I do think that there’s a level of repetition and convolution that haunts the middle episodes of this show. There’s a plot thread or two that I think could’ve been cut in the name of brevity and concision, and we might’ve been able to shave off an episode or two had we put the brakes on some repeating narrative shticks. But it’s little harm, little foul because I was by no means ever bored, and I can understand the reasoning behind pretty much every scene that was included. As for whether or not this is the end of Beef, I do think the ending contained enough ambiguity for future installments, but I honestly hope this is the end because it made for such a taut, engaging, and thoughtful miniseries of a near perfect length. It said everything it needed to say, and wow, what a statement it was.

An audacious, maddening, and ultimately cathartic odyssey through the very common feeling of human disillusionment in the modern world, Beef is irreverently hilarious, unwaveringly tense, and ultimately heartbreaking and life-affirming in its emotional and philosophical profundity. It’s a top shelf, cerebral, and existential dark comedy that taps into dark recesses of the human condition, and yes, it’s all kicked off by petty road rage. It’s as outrageous as it sounds, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

9/10