Beef Series Review: An Eye For An Eye Makes The World Blind | Netflix Series

Cast: Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, Maria Bello, David Choe, Joseph Lee

Creator: Lee Sung Jin

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Created by Lee Sung Jin, Beef Series is set up as a dark comedy that tries to extrapolate the personality of Danny and Amy in search of revenge. Their feud begins with silly revenge tactics — from peeing on the floor to bad reviews — but their falling out brings their most pent-up frustrations to the surface. This game between both soon involves the families of Danny and Amy who find themselves intertwined in this dense web of lies. So, in the end, the viewer finds himself no longer in a dark comedy but a thriller. And it is the particular aspect of this TV series that manages to change genres during the arc of its narrative. Licensed A24 and Netflix, the series could represent a new revelation of 2023.

One of the most surprising and irreverent series of these first months of 2023 arrives on Netflix on Thursday 6 April. Co-produced by A24 Television, Beef Series has already been acclaimed by US critics, who were able to preview it at the South by Southwest Film Festival generating admiration and enthusiasm. Created (and partly directed) by Lee Sung Jin, Beef Series features two ferocious and multifaceted performances interpreted by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, faces that perfectly convey the content of this unexpected series more than any other narrative element. In our review of Beef Series, we will explain how Lee Sung Jin’s product intended for the small screen is much more than an irreverent black comedy, but a very bad and highly corrosive social criticism that does not save anyone, not even the large community Asian in the United States who make up a very good part of its inspired cast.

Beef Series Review: The Story Plot

Beef Series is completely inspired by Los Angeles, a city that can only be traversed in anger by car. On the one hand, Amy is a successful entrepreneur who reclaims her business. She masquerades as a feminist during mushroom dinners with other prominent personalities in the art world, she wants to enjoy the money she has earned and takes this kindness to the extreme that even she doesn’t feel towards others. The moment she has the chance to step outside the box she does. Danny, however, lives on the reverse side of the coin. She doesn’t own much and relies on a cousin who is in and out of prison. He has to look after his brother and is very attached to his family who wants to move to Los Angeles at all costs. When they collide in the opening scenes – and turn into the argument that will drive them throughout the series – we see two people on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Amy and Danny‘s unhappiness attempts to be justified throughout the course of the series. Both protagonists enter into a sort of emotional and psychological burnout whereby they show their contempt for all the people around them and the weaknesses of others. In Beef Series, Amy does it with her husband and Danny with her brother, both in different ways attempting to emotionally sabotage the two closest people. The interpretations of Yeun and Wong appear to the viewer full of simplicity and truth, they exude the wickedness of their characters through vitriolic jokes. It is Wong’s performance that stands out– coming from a career in the comedy genre – brings her appeal even in this different and dramatic role.

Yeun is also challenged by his character. The man tries to keep his life going and tries in every way to make ends meet. The lead pair don’t often share screen time, but when they do Beef Series is truly thrilling. We’re not forced to ultimately see them together as a romantic couple because their bond goes beyond that. Amy and Danny share the darkness of their characters. For this, Beef Series enjoys playing with different backgrounds. Not only from this opposition does a voluntary denunciation of today’s society arise. Amy has a luxurious home that she shares with her family; Danny shares a small flat with his younger brother Paul (Young Mazino).

Beef Series Review and Analysis

Let’s take a small step back and start from the analysis of the curious title in the original language of the series, Beef. The word “beef” in English means “cannon fodder”, but the figurative way of saying “to have a beef with someone ” can take on the meaning of “having an outstanding account with someone”; exactly the type of narrative relationship that binds the two protagonists played by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, whose fate will be inextricably intertwined and in the name of total rancor after having causally collided in the street aboard their respective cars. The reason for this mutual hatred? Specifically, none, except that their (s)fortuitous meeting on four wheels happened in moments of their respective lives in which frustration and a sense of dissatisfaction were so high as to justify a sudden and unexpected attitude of a skilled “hit and the road”. An attitude, the latter, which will give way to a perverse and caustic game of cat and mouse where the watchword seems to be that of “an eye for an eye”. And when Danny and Amy decide to target each other…there’s none for anyone!

Beef Series is above all a serial product that eschews mere surface binge-watching. Yes of course, the level of writing of the various characters, and situations (sometimes absolutely paradoxical!) only sharpens the interest and attention of even the most inexperienced viewer, but Lee Sung Jin’s Netflix show plunges the knife into the wound of his social commentary much deeper than you might think. Because behind the paroxysmal game of petty revenge, disagreements, and mutual threats between Danny and Amy, there is a whole discourse on the chronic inability to feel adequate and in focus within one’s life.

If the sanguine character played by Steven Yeun lives a life of hardship and bricklaying jobs to allow his parents who remained in South Korea to start a new life in the United States, Ali Wong instead perfectly portrays the other side of the coin of the daily life covered by Daniel: successful entrepreneur with a seemingly perfect family behind her and an enviable life, Amy seems to lack for nothing; yet she knows in her heart that despite this she feels deeply empty and dissatisfied. The same emotions that her sworn nemesis also feels, whose meeting/clash will generate fire and sparks in the most unexpected and corrosive way. The success of the Beef Series? It is not only in the stratification of themes and reading levels of the series created by Lee Sung Jin but also in the production endorsement entrusted to A24, for years the home of the most interesting cinema-television products devoted to the inclusiveness of interpreters belonging to sub-ethnic groups. represented in Hollywood.

Thanks to scripts often of great quality and originality, communities until a few years little “used” in the show business industry have become the absolute protagonists of feature films and products for the small screen of depth and socio-cultural relevance. Beef Series is no less a reflection of the sound of repressed anger than the American dream of today, as well as perhaps that of yesterday, has never been the horizon of desire that is easy to pursue ethnic minorities integrated into the corporate fabric of the States United States of America. Almost as if Lee Sung Jin wanted to equate once and for all the daily experiences and torments of the soul of his Asian protagonists with those of the so-called wasp community. That cinema and television, over the decades, have also unjustly colonized it.

Beef Series Review: The Last Words

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are the real highlights of the Beef Series. Their interpretations bring to life a cross-section of everyday life as their characters encompass all the hardships of their generation. Afflicted by a strong sense of helplessness that makes their anger grow, Amy and Danny are two different personalities, who come into each other’s lives in a moment of despair. They will take revenge for their main activity without considering that they are sabotaging the people around them. Beef Series is the miniseries you don’t expect starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong in an absolute state of grace, it tells an irreverent and corrosive contemporary story that delves maliciously and outspoken on the overturning of the American dream within the Asian community. And, not surprisingly, it produces the television division of A24.