Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 20, 2026
It’s been three years since the first season of Beef, and I wish I remembered more from the first go-around. It started with a road-rage incident, it starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, there was a lot of nu-metal, and there was some controversy surrounding one of the cast members that ultimately soured the experience.
That controversy has apparently not followed the show into its second season, which is kind of terrific, even if the story eventually gets a little too big for its themes by the end. The “beef” here is interbeef between two couples, but where it’s most interesting is in the intrabeef within each couple — and in how their lives mirror each other, or emphatically don’t, fifteen years apart.
Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan (both fantastic, as always) play a couple whose marriage is not-so-quietly coming apart, mostly because the dreams they carried into it never materialized. Joshua (Isaac) is the general manager of a ritzy country club catering to the ultra-wealthy — Finneas O’Connell, Michael Phelps, and Suni Lee all play themselves as members — while his wife, Lindsay (Mulligan), handles interior design and essentially co-stars with her husband as the public face of the place.
It is not, however, how either of them imagined their lives: they were supposed to do this for a few years, bank the money, build a private bed-and-breakfast for wealthy vacationers, and settle into something resembling domestic bliss. Instead, they’re grinding in jobs they resent, growing quietly furious at each other and at the versions of themselves they never became. That resentment comes to a head one night after a big club party, when Joshua and Lindsay erupt into a blow-out fight that nearly turns violent — all of it captured by two low-level employees standing outside their window.
Cailee Spaeny plays Ashley Miller, a high-school dropout who runs the golf course beverage cart, and Charles Melton plays her fiancé, Austin Davis, a layabout part-time personal trainer. They’re sickeningly in love, but obsessed with each other in ways that don’t entirely feel authentic. They use the footage of Joshua and Lindsay to blackmail Joshua into promoting Ashley into a position she is clearly unqualified for — but one that comes with the health insurance she needs to cover surgery for an ovarian cyst, which matters because Ashley and Austin have a future family to think about.
That first taste of blackmail has a corrupting influence, particularly on Ashley, who begins projecting Joshua and Lindsay’s life onto her own future as something to aspire toward. Meanwhile, the blackmail plot briefly pulls Joshua and Lindsay back toward each other — until their revenge schemes and embezzlement plots collapse in on everyone, Ashley and Austin included.
There are some genuinely fun, petty acts of vengeance in the second season of Beef, and for much of its run the dissolution of Joshua and Lindsay’s marriage plays like a micro-scale War of the Roses. But at its core, the season is really about these relationships — about who we choose as partners, about what actually constitutes a good marriage, and about the lengths couples will go to achieve their idealized lives, only to discover that the idealized version is worthless if you’re building it with the wrong person.
There is, however, an overarching subplot set partially in Korea involving the club’s billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung, Pachinko), and a cover-up surrounding the death of a patient of her husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho, Parasite) — a storyline also about the corrosive influence of capitalism on a marriage. That thread eventually veers into thriller territory, which I felt robbed the show of some of its intimacy, even if it’s structurally necessary to give the “beef” room to escalate. Creator Lee Sung Jin does eventually bring it back home, but not without some messy maneuvering to get there.
None of that is enough to derail what is, overall, an excellent season of television. Beef Season 2 has something to say to couples in their early years who lie awake wondering if they’ve chosen the right person — and something equally pointed to say to couples in the middle of it all, the ones doing the quiet math on the choices they made and the life they built. It’s a show that understands that the wrong partner doesn’t announce themselves; they just slowly become the person standing on the other side of the window.
