Judging by its fleshy title and flashy cover art, I thought that Netflix’s new hit show Beef might be an ultra-aggressive, steak-cooking competition show. But, from the intro sequence alone, I realized that Beef would be much rawer (and bloodier) than any steak I could have imagined.
Beef begins with an explosive sequence of classic Southern Californian road rage. We first meet lead Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) as he is trying his best to return a Hibachi grill to a hardware store without a receipt. Danny carries his grill and his frustration back to his truck, only to immediately back up into a sparkling white SUV. The SUV lets out an obnoxiously long honk before the driver flips him the bird, sparking an intense car chase. Insults and Starbucks cups are thrown out of windows and Danny flattens a well-manicured front lawn to cut off the SUV, but he can only memorize its plates before the driver races away. From here on out, Beef spirals into a twisted revenge plot between Danny and Amy Lau (Ali Wong), the stressed-out and emotionally repressed driver of the white SUV.
Though Danny and Amy are miles apart in money and privilege, they face the same underlying existential loneliness and cultural pressure to achieve success and support their families.
The drama is as gripping as it is layered and introspective. Danny and Amy are both obviously ticked off by their personal financial situations, though in very different ways. Danny is struggling to support his brother and parents on an unreliable handyman’s salary, taking up odd jobs and venting his frustrations to his unsympathetic, crypto-bro younger brother. Meanwhile, Amy is in the final stretch of a stressful years-long business deal to sell her bougie plant business for millions of dollars. Though Danny and Amy are miles apart in money and privilege, they face the same underlying existential loneliness and cultural pressure to achieve success and support their families. As the show progresses, we watch their increasing obsession with destroying each other become an emotional escape from their deep sense of unfulfillment.
What I really connected to in Beef was its representation of Asian American emotional vulnerability. Amy Lau’s character stays true to actress Ali Wong’s ethnic roots as the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and a Vietnamese immigrant mother. Amy struggles to express her own complicated emotions, constantly defaulting to her professional face of false positivity. Midway through the season, we get a glimpse into Amy’s childhood and the lack of communication and open expression between her parents. Amy tries to take charge of this as an adult, returning home to confront her parents and speak openly about her father’s marital infidelity. Her mother immediately shuts her down, refusing to speak of it even as Amy admits her deep fear that there are “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” of her. This scene hit home for me, having grown up similarly to Amy as the child of a Chinese immigrant with a friend circle composed almost solely of other second-generation Chinese Americans. My friends and I agree that emotional vulnerability was never an option throughout our childhoods. Now, we find that expressing our emotions is a real struggle that can feel impossible to overcome.
Beef chooses to highlight how Amy and Danny are complicit in continuing to pass down generational trauma to their own younger relatives.
What separates Beef from other recent Asian American films and TV is that it doesn’t place the task of resolving generational trauma squarely on the shoulders of first-generation immigrant parents. In the last decade of film and TV hailed as “Asian American,” a lot of emphasis was placed on resolving differences between the first and second generations. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once did this for Chinese immigrant mother Evelyn and American-born daughter Joy by exposing Evelyn to literal parallel universes in a metaphor for opening her mind beyond rigid cultural expectations. Like Joy, Amy and Danny in Beef are second-generation Asian Americans impacted by their parents’ rigid cultural expectations and lack of emotional vulnerability. However, instead of dragging Amy and Danny’s parents into an inter-dimensional adventure of emotional acceptance, Beef chooses to highlight how Amy and Danny are complicit in continuing to pass down generational trauma to their own younger relatives. In Amy’s case, her uncommunicative marriage and extramarital affair demonstrate how she is passing her parents’ own unspoken marital turmoil down to her daughter. Meanwhile, Danny’s rules and expectations force his younger brother, Paul, to conform to the same rigid cultural expectations that Danny absorbed from his parents and the Korean church. When Amy fails to get her parents to communicate, she is forced to question whether her parents are truly capable of resolving her own emotional turmoil, or if this is a task she must take on herself. Amy and Danny declare war on each other in a misguided attempt to feel their emotions; but, in the end, they are mirrors of each other’s flaws and mutual foils in their united goal to disrupt a cycle of trauma for generations to come.
It is refreshing to see a show that focuses on the internal aspects of dissatisfaction instead of just the external causes. You definitely don’t have to be Asian American to understand the struggle that comes with emotional expression and vulnerability, and Beef digs deeper than culture or money to question the real source of Amy and Danny’s dissatisfaction. Beef is raw and vulnerable in a fresh way, and I’m excited to see where it goes and if it’ll be renewed for a second season.