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beef-season-two .jpg

Steven Yeun On a Possible Season 2 of Netflix's 'Beef'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 10, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 10, 2023 |


beef-season-two .jpg

Steven Yeun appeared in this week’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron to discuss his latest project, the phenomenal Netflix series Beef. The project, as Yeun tells it, came together after he and creator Lee Sung Jin mulled over the idea of a series based on a road-rage incident for over a year. In fact, before Lee Sung Jin had the inspired idea to bring in Ali Wong as Yeun’s co-star, they were talking about Yeun starring opposite Stanley Tucci, which would have been a completely different series.

It’s a riveting, fantastic, and darkly comic show that unspools and spirals over the course of 10 episodes. Lee Sung Jin had a road map for the entire series and even had scripts for the first eight of ten episodes before shooting began on Beef. Maron, however, wondered on the podcast whether Lee Sung Jin had a roadmap for a second season, which Maron seemed very interested in, and the answer, according to Yeun, is “no.”

“We don’t even know if we’re going to do a second season,” Yeun told him. It’s not because Netflix hasn’t renewed it yet; it’s because “we really did want to close the loop on season one in a real way. That was us consciously. That wasn’t a Netflix thing.”

In other words, Yeun is not ruling out another season, should Netflix want one, but they wrote it with one season in mind, and he’s right in that the series does not need a second one. It is a closed loop and a perfectly satisfying one-season series. It’d be great to spend a little more time with Yeun and Wong’s characters, but it’d be just as well if Netflix or Lee Sung Jin decided against it. That is to say, don’t let Netflix’s tendency to cancel series dissuade anyone from watching Beef, because it doesn’t need a second season.

The rest of the interview is a worthwhile listen, and I particularly liked Yeun talking about the Christian band (or “Praise Band”) that he — like his Beef character — used to play in, right up through his 20s.