Beef Review

The premise sounds like a sketch and the execution is anything but. Lee Sung Jin uses the feud as a delivery mechanism for two people who have no way to express despair, a contractor drowning in debt and a business owner about to sell her company for millions, and the joke is that neither of them can admit the fight is the only honest relationship they have. Steven Yeun is superb, playing rage as exhaustion, and Ali Wong is even better, giving a performance of controlled contempt that lets you see exactly how much work the smiling costs.

The supporting characters are not comic relief; Young Mazino's brother and Joseph Lee's husband are given full interior lives. The photography is sun bleached Los Angeles suburbia at its ugliest and most beautiful. The final two episodes take a swing that divides people, abandoning the plot for something closer to a fever dream, and the satire of wealthy art world sincerity is broader than the rest. It earns the ending anyway.