Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 22, 2026
Although the reviews for Beef season two have largely held (86 percent, compared to 98 percent in the first season), the audience is clearly not as enamored of this go-round — the audience score has plummeted from 87 percent to 62 percent. The audience scores are not the only thing in freefall, either. Streaming views for the second season of Beef have also dropped by 60 percent compared to the first season, and it debuted at only number 10 on Netflix’s streaming chart in its opening week. That’s a FUBAR-like drop-off, and it strongly suggests season three is not coming.
That also suggests a lot of viewers bailed early, which is a shame, because it’s a slower burn than the first season but really starts to hum midway through. We do not live in patient times, though, which is why I am writing another ending explained piece for those who couldn’t muster the bandwidth to see it through.
Spoilers
The second season of Beef stars Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as Joshua and Lindsay, respectively. He’s the general manager of a country club. She’s the interior designer and, along with her husband, the public face of the club, which is owned by billionaire Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung). After a successful club event in which Joshua and Lindsay present as the perfect couple, they return home and get into a near-violent argument about their dashed dreams for the future.
Couple Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton), low-level country club employees, return a wallet to Joshua and end up capturing this argument on their iPhones. They’re madly in love but struggling financially, so they use the video as leverage to blackmail Joshua into promoting Ashley into a position for which she is not remotely qualified. Emboldened by that success, Ashley also uses her new position to convince Chairwoman Park to hire Austin as the club’s physical therapist — lying about his having the appropriate certification.
Joshua doesn’t scrutinize Austin’s credentials too closely, either, because he’s busy running his own scheme: embezzling money from the club with plans to make Ashley the perfect scapegoat. She’s bad at her job, so she won’t notice, and if he gets caught, he figures, he can pin it all on her. Joshua intends to use the embezzled funds to finally build the bed-and-breakfast he and Lindsay have long dreamed of.
This is where the “beef” between Joshua/Lindsay and Ashley/Austin begins to escalate in earnest. When Ashley ends up in the hospital with an ovarian cyst and a torsion, Joshua offers her timely medical care in exchange for her promise to delete the video from the cloud. She refuses, and Ashley ends up losing an ovary. In retaliation, once she recovers, she breaks into Joshua’s house, puts blood from her wound into his orange juice, and lets their beloved dog escape. Not realizing Ashley is behind the missing dog, Joshua and Lindsay turn on each other — a fight that eventually leads to their decision to divorce (and the dog does not survive the coyote).
Meanwhile, Chairwoman Park learns about Joshua’s embezzlement and is already aware that Austin isn’t a licensed physical therapist. But her husband — Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho) — accidentally killed a patient in a botched facial reconstruction surgery, so Chairwoman Park launches her own embezzlement scheme, secretly using the club’s finances to cover up her husband’s medical negligence. Joshua/Lindsay/Ashley/Austin are the perfect patsies.
When Joshua and Lindsay’s divorce turns ugly, Lindsay befriends Ashley because she wants the recording — useful ammunition in the proceedings. That turns out to be unnecessary, however, because Joshua — who has been trying to cozy up to Austin for the same reasons — has an epiphany during a drug experience and decides to give Lindsay everything she wants in the divorce.
While all of this is unfolding, Austin is falling out of love with Ashley, who is not the person he thought she was. He’s falling instead for Chairwoman Park’s assistant, Eunice. Eunice, however, discovers that Chairwoman Park is running the embezzlement scheme and plans to pin everything on Joshua, Lindsay, Ashley, and Austin. She also learns that Park killed her own grandson, who had discovered the scheme and tried to blackmail her. Eunice panics, reasonably concluding that she could be next.
Everything comes to a head when Lindsay and Ashley accompany a country club guest to Korea to receive cosmetic surgery from Dr. Kim. Eunice finds proof of the scheme on the Chairwoman’s phone and backs it up to a hard drive, planning to turn it over to the authorities. Park, meanwhile, tries to have Joshua killed and frame it as a suicide. The hitman botches it, and Joshua — who realizes, in the way people tend to during botched assassination attempts, that he actually does love Lindsay — jumps on a flight to Korea.
What follows is a melee. Dr. Kim actually tries to save Joshua and company, but his wife has him shot for his trouble. Joshua, Lindsay, Ashley, and Austin are eventually captured and held. Joshua then falsely confesses to the entire scheme to protect Lindsay — and, collaterally, Ashley and Austin. Austin breaks up with Ashley, who hands him the hard drive that will implicate Park. But after Austin realizes that Eunice doesn’t actually love him, he turns the drive over to Park and reconciles with Ashley.
In the epilogue, set eight years later, Joshua is being released from prison, having found some genuine peace on the inside. Lindsay waited for him for a few years but eventually married a nice man and had a child. Joshua is happy for her. Ashley and Austin, meanwhile, have essentially become the new Joshua and Lindsay at the club — and like Joshua and Lindsay, they’re discovering that professional success cannot give them the happy marriage they so badly wanted.
The thesis isn’t subtle: Joshua and Lindsay learned from their experience, faced the error of their ways, and found something like peace. Ashley and Austin learned nothing and are doomed to repeat the cycle.
