Review: Beef
Ada Lambert | May 4, 2023
One moment you’re driving back home after a tiring day of work, cranking up the volume to your feel-good playlist to temporarily numb the stress. The next thing you know, someone is backing out right in front of you carelessly. You slam on the breaks. Everything seems fine at first– the car jolts to a stop once they notice you– until the person that nearly smashed into the side of your truck sticks their hand out and gives you a cold, stout middle finger. Oh, it’s on.
Suddenly your car is on the news— “road rage incident ruined my flowers!” A perfect white SUV and a beat-up red truck are caught running each other off the road into someone's yard on a Ring security camera. Nobody can make out the faces of the drivers, not at first that is. The incidents don’t stop there though. They continue to spiral and become more extreme until both of your lives are left in shambles. You are different in all senses other than one— your inconsolable rage.
You have beef.
The story follows Amy Lau, a wealthy suburban mother with a booming house plant business, and Danny Cho, the owner of a failing maintenance company. Lau is in a struggling marriage and is dissatisfied with her wealthy lifestyle, despite her constant fixation to make her life appear perfect. No matter how far she moves up in the world, she feels empty. Cho on the other hand is quite the opposite. He is careless with his money. At one point, he invests twenty-thousand dollars in crypto currencies — money that he borrowed from his cousin— only to lose it all.
Throughout the series he is desperately trying to earn back his losses and more so he can build his immigrant parents their dream home, repay his cousin and save his business. This drives him to make a plethora of bad choices and to betray the people around him, which ultimately leaves him more lonely and poor than he was at the beginning. Lau does not lose her money, but she forfeits her own happiness through acts of revenge and power.
After the initial car chase incident, Cho tracks down the address connected to Lau’s vehicle through a license plate lookup website, a detail he caught as she was fleeing the scene. He makes the careless decision to introduce himself as a maintenance person doing work in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Lau is holding the door open with one hand and clutching a gun in the other. Why, you ask? I’ll let you discover that for yourself (if you think you know, you don’t.) At this point Cho believes that it was Lau’s husband who had chased him in the car, under the assumption that a woman would not engage in such unladylike behavior (aka the belief that women do not have anger!)
After realizing her husband is not home, Cho becomes nosy about the car, asking Lau who drives the shiny, white SUV in their driveway. She tells him that it is her work car, and that her husband has his own vehicle. Upon learning that it was in fact Lau who started the car chase, he asks to use her bathroom in which he proceeds to pee all over her brand-smacking-new hardwood floor.
The first episode comes to a close with Cho slipping out the front door and back to his beloved truck, moments before Lau discovers a puddle of pee leaking from the bathroom doorway (cue The Reason by Hoobastank— weird song choice for this scene, but it sort of works.)
In the last moments of the scene, we catch a glimpse of Lau busting out the front door in a blind rage, Cho running to his car, a shit-eating grin on his face. He hops in his truck and takes off, leaving Lau in the dust. In the heat of the moment, Cho sticks his hand out and gives her a taste of her own medicine, waving his middle finger in the air. This sets off the energy for the rest of the series— two angry, unhappy people finding new ways to take their revenge on each other.
This show is like no other. None of the characters are completely good nor bad, they all have their own complexities and flaws that make for a believable storyline. You will find yourself rooting for either side while still finding them undeniably relatable and having empathy for the hardships they cope with. It’s so much more than a revenge story.
At a certain point, the line between reality and fiction dissolves into a pool of anticipation and excitement. Each episode builds in intensity as it goes on, leaving you wanting more. It’s the kind of show that feels so mesmerizing that everything around you blurs and stops moving. Someone could say something to me while it was on and I wouldn’t hear a damn thing. I cried, yelled, cussed at the TV and every time I thought I’d reached a good stopping point, there would be a mouth-dropping plot twist that kept me locked in and invested. If you love being on the edge of your seat as much as I do, add this one to your watch list and enjoy the ride.
“Beef” is currently streaming on Netflix.