Netflix’s Beef doesn’t let anyone be just a stereotype

The Netflix series Beef is a catastrophic spiral of existential despair and self-destruction. However, it begins with little more than a traffic brawl: Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) reverses out of an LA parking lot in his crappy red truck and nearly crashes into a pristine white SUV. Honks are heard, words shouted, middle fingers stretched out. It is the kind of conflict where the participants tend to move on with their lives once they’ve let off some steam.

But for Danny and the unseen SUV driver, there is still a lot of steam to blow off. Danny gives chase, swinging through red lights and stop signs as his opponent pelts his windshield with trash. Once the confrontation is over and the SUV speeds away, we see that the driver is another Asian American: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a hurried entrepreneur about to sell her thriving business for a huge payday.

The characters in it Beef are not well-intentioned victims of circumstances who learn some sort of lesson by the end. They may be hideous, selfish, and narrow-minded in ways rarely seen outside of white-centred narratives, and their behavior takes on a fascinating extra layer in the context of the Asian-American identity that unites them even across classes and cultures.

Essentially, the series is an extreme interpretation of something Amy’s touchy husband George (Joseph Lee) says: you never know what the other person is going through. Danny is a struggling handyman who lives outside the motel his family once owned with his good-for-nothing brother Paul (Young Mazino). George is right in a sense that Amy and Danny only see the other as a target for their anger rather than as a separate person with their own lives and feelings. Of course, he also ignores the fact that Danny tracked Amy down in the aftermath, lured her into her house, and angrily urinated all over her bathroom.

Beef gives its Asian Americans room to be anything but reserved and polite. We look at the imperfect coping mechanisms they’ve developed, like masturbating with a gun or inhaling a disturbing amount of Burger King. And then we see how, by portraying each other as an unequivocal enemy, they find an outlet for the emotions they’ve held onto for much of their lives.

When Danny comes home to the cramped room he shares with Paul, he rants with a smile about the expectation of taking on “someone else’s shit.” It’s a quality Steven Yeun has built a recent career on as an actor to express: the buried pain of his traumatized ex-child actor in Nothe simmering of sociopathy Burning. He conveys something more that is going on under the face he presents to the world. In Beef, Danny can’t be honest, even if he’s otherwise open about how he feels – he lies to his brother that he scared off the white SUV and “won” the confrontation, and spends much of the series on making up petty excuses like his instinct. (“I breastfed yesterday,” explaining why I was outmatched by the distinctly more athletic Paul.)

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Netflix

Also in Amy, we see the things to ignore and the performance to give, which similarly ties into Ali Wong’s own career: she’s essentially struggling to keep burying her outspoken comedic persona. Her interactions with Jordan (Maria Bello), the potential buyer of her company, are fraught with casual racism that she smiles through, such as when she’s praised for her “Zen Buddhist” vibe. Amy sees selling her business as an escape from such soul-sucking maintenance, a way for her to earn money and focus on raising her young daughter. But even in her personal life she goes unheard – George interrupts before she can even explain the road accident.

On some level, the characters can trace the oppression back to their families. Amy says the same about her quiet Midwestern upbringing, while Danny notes that, as the oldest son, he took on most of his parents’ demands. As in so many Asian-American stories, the protagonists work under a cloud of generational strife. But repression is forced upon them equally by the societal stereotype of the model minority, the ones who keep their heads down and never make a fuss – the very behavior Danny rails against in the first episode, and the expectation that countless Asian Americans will live their lives faced with.

If Beef‘s conflict spirals out of control, it places its characters in a pantheon of TV anti-heroes. The self-actualizing arc of his characters and the collateral damage they leave behind plays like a low stakes sort of thing Break bad, with the pettiness and disaffection not obscured by a climactic drama about drug trafficking. We understand Amy and Danny, maybe even pursuing their success at times, and Beef access to that empathy without having to make them particularly likeable or sympathetic. The series dismantles stereotypes by giving the characters such depth and revealing the underlying humanity. and humanity, Beef recognizes is often messy, angry and imperfect.

The context of their actions and the readable history of pain that comes with them don’t redeem them, and their more unsavory features never go away. Danny’s interactions with Amy are permeated with ignorant chauvinism, first thinking only George could be his adversary and then labeling her a bored housewife looting her husband’s “art money.” And Amy, for her part, is hardly deterred by the huge income gap separating her and Danny – painting “I AM POOR” on the side of his truck and tanking the reviews for his floundering construction company. When she follows him to his motel, she gloats that he didn’t find her as a homeowner.

For as intense as the specific rivalry here is, there is also a universal truth to their struggle, to the catharsis of expression. If Beef continues, it shows that Danny and Amy are far from the only characters to get knocked down by the weight of expectation. George is the son of a famous sculptor, but his own work shows none of the talent and makes no money, leaving Amy to provide for the family. Paul complains about the way older generations pass on all their problems and insecurities to the next. They too are products of neglected emotion; when Amy and Danny manipulate them for their own ends, Paul and George taste something of the validation they never clearly received from their own loved ones.

With the proliferation of on-screen appearances over the years, Asian Americans have been entrenching previously unthinkable starring roles such as things like love interests and superheroes. Are Beefhowever, that removes a truly crucial hurdle in that regard: it leaves its protagonists and peripheral characters to be messy and complex, if not unequivocal assholes.