Why Beef Is the Best Thing Streaming Right Now

Netflix Beef, created by Lee Sung Jin, starts with a road rage incident between two strangers and escalates into a darkly comic exploration of rage, shame, class anxiety, and existential emptiness. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong deliver career-defining performances.

The episode titles are quotations, and the first one tells you what you are watching. The Birds Don't Sing, They Screech in Pain comes from Werner Herzog describing the jungle in Burden of Dreams. The rest are pulled from artists, philosophers and self-help language in roughly equal measure. This is a series about people performing serenity while something screams underneath, and the titles say so before a scene has started.

Danny Cho, played by Yeun, is a failing contractor drowning in debt. Amy Lau, played by Wong, is a successful entrepreneur whose perfect life is a facade. Their collision becomes a distorted mirror where each sees the life they envy and the person they fear becoming.

The geography does a lot of work. Danny is scraping by in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, taking on jobs he underbids. Amy lives in Calabasas and is selling a boutique houseplant business to a retail magnate. The Korean church scenes, the praise band, the folding chairs, the crying in the car park, are the most precise depiction of that world on American television, and they are played for warmth as much as comedy.

The show treats its Korean-American characters with a specificity that mainstream television rarely achieves. Lee Sung Jin mines his own Korean-American upbringing for details that ring true.

Ten episodes of thirty to forty minutes, which is a weekend rather than a commitment, and it is one story with an ending. Lee Sung Jin wrote it as a closed loop. No cliffhanger, no sequel bait in the final scene. That is rare enough on Netflix to be worth stating plainly, and it is the reason the show rewards watching in two or three sittings rather than ten.

Tonally, Beef walks an extraordinary tightrope. A scene will pivot from absurd comedy to genuine menace to quiet devastation within minutes, and the transitions never feel forced.

The soundtrack is a joke and a thesis at once. Danny's inner life runs on late-1990s and early-2000s alt-rock and Christian rock, Hoobastank and Incubus and the rest of what soundtracked American suburbia when he was a teenager, and the show plays it straight rather than ironically. Bobby Krlic, who scored Midsommar, wrote the underlying music. The gap between the two registers is deliberate.

The supporting cast, including Young Mazino as Danny younger brother Paul, adds layers that prevent the show from becoming a two-person grudge match.

Beef is streaming on Netflix at https://www.netflix.com/title/81447461. The series won multiple Emmys and Golden Globes.

A24 produced it, and it took the limited series categories at the 2024 Emmys, with lead acting wins for both Steven Yeun and Ali Wong plus writing and directing for Lee Sung Jin. Netflix has since commissioned a second season with a new story and a new cast, which means the first stands entirely alone. Treat it as a film in five parts.

Beef is essential because it captures a feeling that most prestige TV avoids: the irrational, self-destructive rage that simmers beneath middle-class American life. It is funny, uncomfortable, and profound, often simultaneously.