Netflix’s Beef is letting its cast be assholes all season long

The Netflix series beef is a catastrophic spiral of existential despair and self-destruction. However, it begins with little more than a traffic altercation: Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) reverses his crappy red truck out of an LA parking lot and nearly crashes into a pristine white SUV. Horns are honked, words are shouted, middle fingers are stretched. It’s the kind of conflict where the participants tend to move on with their lives once they’ve let off some steam.

But there’s still quite a bit of steam to be let off for Danny and the invisible SUV driver. Danny gives chase, weaving through red lights and stop signs while his opponent throws trash at his windshield. Once the confrontation is over and the SUV speeds away, we see that the driver is another Asian American: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a harried entrepreneur about to sell her thriving business for a huge payday.

The characters in it beef are not well intentioned victims of circumstances who end up learning some lesson. They are allowed to be terrible, selfish, and petty in ways we rarely see outside of white-centered stories, and their behavior takes on an intriguing additional layer in the context of Asian-American identity, uniting them even across class and cultural lines .

Essentially, the show is an extreme take on what Amy’s touchy husband George (Joseph Lee) says: You never know what the other person is going through. Danny is a struggling handyman who lives in the motel his family once owned with his lazy brother Paul (Young Mazino). In a way, George is right that Amy and Danny only see the other as a target for their anger and not as a separate person with their own life and feelings. Of course, he also ignores the fact that Danny tracked Amy down in the episode, snuck into her house, and maliciously pissed all over her bathroom.

beef gives his Asian Americans room to be anything but reserved and polite. We observe the imperfect coping mechanisms they have developed, like masturbating with a gun or inhaling a scary amount of Burger King. And then we see how, by portraying each other as outright enemies, they find an outlet for the emotions they’ve held onto for so much of their lives.

When Danny comes home to the cramped room he shares with Paul, he scolds the expectation of “taking other people’s shit” with a smile. It’s a trait Steven Yeun has expressed as an actor in his recent career: the buried pain of his traumatized ex-actor nopethe simmering of sociopathy in combustion. He conveys something more that’s going on underneath the face he presents to the world. In beef, Danny can’t be honest, even when he’s otherwise open about his feelings – he lies to his brother about shooing away the white SUV and “winning” the confrontation, and he spends much of the series trying to find tiny excuses, as if he were over instinct. (“I did chest yesterday,” as an explanation for being outclassed by the much more athletic Paul.)

In Amy, too, we see the things she must ignore and the accomplishment she must accomplish, which is similarly consistent with Ali Wong’s own career: she is essentially struggling to bury her outspoken comic persona. Her interactions with Jordan (Maria Bello), the potential buyer for her company, are laced with casual racism, which she smiles through as if being praised for her “Zen Buddhist” aura. Amy sees selling her business as an escape from such mental upkeep, a way for her to make money and focus on raising her young daughter. But even in her private life, she remains unheard – George interrupts her before she can even explain the traffic incident.

In a way, the characters can trace the oppression to their families. Amy says the same about her quiet Midwestern upbringing, while Danny notes that as the eldest son, he shouldered most of his parents’ demands. As in so many Asian-American stories, the protagonists work under a cloud of generational conflict. But they’re also just as much oppressed by the societal stereotype of the exemplary minority, those who keep their heads down and never make a fuss — the very behavior Danny rages against in the first episode, and the expectation that countless Asian Americans have faced it all their lives.

As beefThe conflict spirals out of control, throwing its characters into a pantheon of TV anti-heroes. The self-fulfilling arc of his characters and the collateral damage they leave behind plays out like a low-stakes kind of game breaking Bad, with the pettiness and unhappiness uneclipsed by the escalating drug-dealing drama. We understand Amy and Danny, who may even occasionally root for their success, and beef accesses that empathy without having to make it particularly likeable or likeable. The series breaks down stereotypes by giving its characters such depth and revealing the humanity underneath. and humanity beef recognizes is often chaotic, angry and imperfect.

The context of their actions and the readable story of pain that accompanies them does not exonerate them, and their more unsavory qualities never diminish. Danny’s interactions with Amy are steeped in a naïve chauvinism, first fantasizing that only George could be his opponent, and then labeling her a bored housewife siphoning off her husband’s “fake money.” For her part, Amy is undeterred by the huge income gap she and Danny share – she paints “I AM POOR” on the side of his truck and fuels the reviews for his faltering construction business. As she tracks him to his motel, she’s pleased that he didn’t strike her as a homeowner.

For as intense as the specific rivalry here is, there is also a universal truth in their struggles, in the catharsis of expression. As beef Further, it shows that Danny and Amy are far from the only characters weighed down by the burden of anticipation. George is the son of a famous sculptor, but his own work shows none of the talent and doesn’t make money, leaving Amy to support the family. Paul laments the way older generations pass all their problems and insecurities on to the next. They, too, are products of neglected emotions; As Amy and Danny manipulate them for their own ends, Paul and George taste some of the validation they never clearly received from their own loved ones.

With the rise of on-screen representation over the years, Asian Americans have anchored previously unthinkable starring roles as things like love interests and superheroes. It is beefwhich, however, removes a really key hurdle in this regard: it leaves its protagonists and supporting characters chaotic and complex, if not outright assholes.