By any standard, 2023 has been a phenomenal year for telly, with all manner of old favourites returning to our screens leaner and stronger than ever before. Without exaggeration, when the time comes to write the history of television in the 21st century, you might find half a dozen standout highlights from this year alone.
And yet, pound for pound, they were all outclassed by a contender that came out of nowhere. Nobody knew a thing about Beef before it was plonked ungraciously on to a Netflix submenu. And then, if you watched it, it very quickly became all you could think about. Dense with entertainment, taut with drama, able to escalate vertiginously without warning, Beef is about as good as television gets.
Beef’s premise didn’t inspire a lot of faith on paper. The story of two strangers who endure a moment of road rage and find themselves Tom and Jerrying their way across southern California, Beef had the potential to be soulless and two-dimensional, more spectacle than story. But the show’s genius was its ability to use that inciting incident to show us exactly who these two people are, and then to relentlessly dig down into why they were like that in the first place. Over its run, Beef became a story of failure and frustration and dark obsession – sometimes abandoning traditional storytelling methods altogether – but without ever forgetting its responsibility to entertain.
A lot of the credit for this should go to the two leads. Ali Wong and Steven Yeun are both wildly talented performers in their own right – Yeun as the beating heart of The Walking Dead for so many years, Wong as a standup – but here they found characters that fit their skillsets perfectly. Yeun’s Danny Cho was vindictive and frustrated, while Wong’s Amy Lau was imperious and condescending, a shard of ice behind a veneer of success. Awful separately, but somehow able to bring the absolute worst out of each other together. What a potent, combustible mix.
The plotting, too, was confident and twisty, and the level of invention so high that during some episodes it felt like you were watching three genres at once. This was a show that treated haphazard urination with the same severity as a full-scale home break-in, and an ugly vase with the same consequences as an extramarital affair.
In a year where all of Hollywood’s writers downed tools over their increasingly poor working conditions, Beef is also a shining example of the value of traditional writers’ rooms. Creator Lee Sung Jin spent his early career doing stints writing and producing on shows such as Silicon Valley and 2 Broke Girls, before finding his niche on formally daring shows including Tuca and Bertie and Undone. When he was finally given the keys to his own show, he was able to draw on the wealth of experience he’d gained over the previous decade. Beef has the tightness of a network sitcom and the emotional breadth of Undone, but has such a specific point of view – both culturally and energetically – that it couldn’t have come from anyone else.
And then there’s the finale. It’s becoming something of a trope with A24 shows that the final episode of a series will reject the entire plot in favour of a more freeform, experimental denouement. Without spoilers, Beef is also slightly guilty of this, but its woo-woo experimentation never forgot to serve its characters. When the finale’s mysterious, elliptical journey was over, Danny and Amy had a better understanding of each other than ever before, and so did the viewer. The last second of the last scene was gorgeous and ambiguous and, should it be the definitive end, will go down as one of the all-time greats.
Whether it should be a definitive end is another question. Taken as a whole, the 10 episodes of Beef felt satisfyingly complete, but the hunger of the modern television industry – not to mention the eagerness of Netflix to capitalise on a hit – means that we should never say never. Back in August, Lee told reporters that he had one “really big idea” that he would be open to exploring and that, while nothing had been commissioned yet, he had stories planned out for three seasons.
If I were Lee, I’d leave things be. Beef is such a miraculous show – so inventive and daring and propulsive – that the worst thing in the world would be for it to take another grab at the apple and miss. Perfection like this doesn’t happen very often. Let’s keep it perfect.
