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The primary time I noticed Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I discovered myself sitting up just a little straighter and leaning just a little nearer towards my TV. I knew Wong had a starring position, however Amy caught me off guard. Carrying a cream-colored bucket hat, her palms gripping the steering wheel and her face frozen in worry, she regarded nothing like what I anticipated of the faceless driver I’d simply watched in the present’s opening minutes—the one who’d careened recklessly throughout lanes, taunting, threatening, and throwing trash at a stranger.
Then once more, Beef likes toying with assumptions of who its characters could be and the place its story may veer subsequent. The half-hour-episode Netflix collection from the first-time showrunner Lee Sung Jin (Silicon Valley) is tough to categorize; it’s concurrently a black comedy, a home drama, and a psychological thriller. It begins with a road-rage incident that Amy units off when she flips the chicken at Danny (Steven Yeun) in a parking zone after he practically backs his truck into her Benz. Like a gnarlier Altering Lanes, their ensuing feud results in an escalating collection of vengeful acts that construct from petty pranks into horrifying, morally questionable schemes. That the present feels balanced in any respect is all the way down to how nicely drawn each leads are. Amy is a rich entrepreneur with a loving husband, a cute daughter, and a state-of-the-art mansion. Danny is a contractor barely making lease who shares a cramped residence together with his slacker brother. Each are deeply, desperately sad.
But of the 2, Amy is much less instantly sympathetic. Danny lives a troublesome paycheck-to-paycheck way of life, his each failure deepening his perception that the world works in opposition to him. Amy, in the meantime, has no apparent motive to be depressing. She has all of it—if “all” is outlined as a stellar profession and a nuclear household. Lee, who was impressed to create the collection after getting caught in a road-rage incident himself, initially conceived of the character as a white man, matching the identification of the motive force he’d encountered in actual life. However shortly—in “perhaps half a day,” Lee informed me over the telephone—he dropped the concept; he didn’t need the collection to be merely about racial dynamics or to boil all the way down to a tradition conflict. Later, with Wong in thoughts, he envisioned a brand new character: a lady whose self-made success is the reason for her downfall. Not that Beef tears Amy aside; as an alternative, the collection grants her increasingly achievements, dissecting how her suffocating ambition pushes her to behave on her worst impulses in opposition to an entire stranger. She is TV’s most compelling antiheroine of late: somebody who is aware of she’s her personal worst enemy and who, as Lee defined, “feels very a lot trapped in a maze of her personal creation.”
Think about how Amy consistently questions her energy and instinctively tries to cover that self-doubt. She might seem like a Robust Fashionable Lady—she agrees to pictures with followers and participates in glitzy panels about feminine entrepreneurs, the place she says issues like “Regardless of what all people tells you, you may have all of it!”—however she’s uncomfortable with the picture. The present doesn’t place her in a male-dominated discipline; she owns an artsy, minimalist plant enterprise, and she or he’s engaged on promoting her firm to the feminine proprietor of a retail chain. Within the presence of equally well-off ladies, she wears a everlasting smile by way of gritted enamel. She clothes in gentle knits and unwrinkled silks, as if to distance herself from the girlboss uniform of energy fits and pencil skirts. “There was one thing attention-grabbing to us as writers about somebody who has a lot chaos occurring inside however [who’s] making an attempt to cowl that with as a lot calm and people-appeasing power as potential,” Lee mentioned. Amy is aware of that expressing her discontent together with her apparently excellent life would break individuals’s impression of her as a task mannequin. And regardless of her reluctance to play the half, she likes figuring out that she is taken into account an inspiration.
Moreover, when she does attempt to clarify how she feels, the individuals closest to her can’t perceive why she’s uneasy. In a single wrenching scene, Amy divulges her malaise to her husband, George (Joseph Lee). “There’s this sense I’ve had for a very long time,” she says, squeezing out her phrases between pauses. “I don’t keep in mind when it began; I can’t pinpoint precisely when or why … It looks like the bottom, however, like, proper right here.” She gestures to her chest as she begins to cry. George reacts in a supportive method: “I do know lots of people who battled despair and received,” he says—however the assertion solely causes Amy to close their dialog down. His phrases are too constructive, too insistent that she beat no matter she’s obtained. Via her, Beef highlights a sophisticated twist on loneliness: Amy has a wholesome community of family members, however the extra encouraging they’re, the more serious she feels. She’s lucky to have a doting husband and the means to hunt assist. So why can’t she do what’s anticipated of her and really feel higher?
The concept that existential disappointment can come for anybody is private for Lee: He informed me that the scene of Amy’s confession got here instantly from a second within the writers’ room throughout which he tried to explain his personal anxiousness, and ended up weeping in entrance of the workers. Like Amy, Lee hasn’t been capable of shake off the burden in his chest: “That feeling continues to be very a lot there. It doesn’t go away … Scripting this character was determining a option to settle for that—that for a few of us, that feeling is simply everlasting.” Amy’s makes an attempt to search out catharsis lead her to make selections that vary from farcical to horrifying, if not outright prison. In her, Lee conveys the fun and desperation of that unending seek for launch—a journey that pushes Beef ahead, step by fascinating step. Wong sells every of them. She’s by no means been funnier, or extra heartbreaking.
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