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The primary time I noticed Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I discovered myself sitting up a bit of straighter and leaning a bit of 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 may be and the place its story would possibly 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 chook 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 right 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 house along 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 life-style, his each failure deepening his perception that the world works towards 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 id of the driving force he’d encountered in actual life. However shortly—in “perhaps half a day,” Lee instructed me over the cellphone—he dropped the thought; he didn’t need the collection to be merely about racial dynamics or to boil right 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 a substitute, the collection grants her an increasing number of achievements, dissecting how her suffocating ambition pushes her to behave on her worst impulses towards 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.”
Take into account how Amy continually questions her energy and instinctively tries to cover that self-doubt. She could look 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 everyone 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 area; 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 girls, she wears a everlasting smile via gritted tooth. She clothes in delicate knits and unwrinkled silks, as if to distance herself from the girlboss uniform of energy fits and pencil skirts. “There was one thing fascinating to us as writers about somebody who has a lot chaos happening inside however [who’s] attempting to cowl that with as a lot calm and people-appeasing vitality as doable,” Lee stated. Amy is aware of that expressing her discontent along with her apparently good life would spoil folks’s impression of her as a task mannequin. And regardless of her reluctance to play the half, she likes understanding that she is taken into account an inspiration.
Apart from, when she does attempt to clarify how she feels, the folks 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 bear in mind when it began; I can’t pinpoint precisely when or why … It appears 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 melancholy and received,” he says—however the assertion solely causes Amy to close their dialog down. His phrases are too optimistic, too insistent that she beat no matter she’s acquired. By her, Beef highlights an advanced 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 instructed me that the scene of Amy’s confession got here straight 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 load in his chest: “That feeling remains to be very a lot there. It doesn’t go away … Penning 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 legal. 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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