Beef
All the Things We’re Never Going to Have
Season 2
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
Beef returns with two couples getting crushed under the pressures of capitalism, class, and marital stress.
Photo: Netflix
The first season of Lee Sung Jin’s critically acclaimed Beef focused on the kind of everyday indignity that threatens to overcome a person already within an inch of losing their shit. Class tensions emerged as the central road-rage incident escalated: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), living a glamorous life in Calabasas, was overworked, exhausted, and horny; Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a contractor struggling to keep his business afloat, was angry both at the system, which made it impossible for him to achieve upward mobility, and at his family, who held him back. Despite their opposite financial situations, Danny and Amy shared a crazy-making feeling of discontent, a bitter anger at the way their life turned out. Wasn’t it supposed to be better than this?
That question is a renewable source of material: Returning for its second season, Beef revisits characters on the brink of blowing up the lives they didn’t even ask for. “All the Things We’re Never Going to Have” opens on a fundraising event at the Monte Vista Point country club, as general manager Josh (Oscar Isaac) addresses the crowd with his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), by his side. The sun sets over the manicured golf course, the weather looks a perfect 75 degrees, Josh and Lindsay are beautiful and polished. What could possibly be wrong?
Well, for one, Josh forgets the date of his wife’s birthday. He off-handedly agrees to go on a Vegas trip with Troy, a member and sort-of-friend, forgetting that he’s supposed to be busy that weekend. That slip-up starts them on a blowout fight, though we get the sense it’s not the first time they’ve thrown things at each other. Their resentments are hard and old: They were supposed to turn their property into “a bespoke bed-and-breakfast” six years ago, but Josh has devoted his life to the club, which Lindsay thinks is pathetic. Besides, he spent all of her inheritance money on his own mother. Josh doesn’t understand why Lindsay can’t just be happy with the life they have, which is a good one: good clothes, good cars, good house, “privileged access to titans in every industry,” “dinner with Bono.” Still, none of those perks can make up for the fact that they haven’t had sex in a year. Josh’s only two modes of sexual activity, according to Lindsay, are “sexual deviancy or celibacy.” Later on in the episode, he will swear off porn and delete his account from a subscription-based website.
Josh is trying. He is good at his job, he runs, he listens to podcasts. He is working on himself, not that Lindsay can appreciate it. Their fight reaches a climax when, after declaring she hates him, Lindsay throws a wine glass at Josh. They smash picture frames, break guitars, threaten each other with a golf club. Mulligan and Isaac put on a balletic performance. They are intense and hilarious, going at each other with feverish hatred, making the couple’s resentments feel lived-in. Matching the high-wire tempo of the first season’s inciting fender bender, this opening sets up the theme of the season. Forget road rage; this time, the everyday indignity that will set off our characters is marriage.
In fact, our new characters are exceedingly apologetic drivers. After the fundraiser, sweet young couple Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) are making out by the tennis courts, fantasizing about one day having a family, when their boss, Janet (Michole Briana White), asks them to drop off Josh’s wallet at his house. Pulling in, they almost crash into another car, but the deferential Austin keeps insisting for the other car to go. After leaving Josh’s wallet under the welcome mat, Austin and Ashley follow the sound of shouting, thinking it “sounds really bad.” Ashley pulls out her phone to record any evidence, which is how she ends up with a video of her general manager about to brain his wife with a golf club. The foursome stares at each other for a moment, then Ashley and Austin literally run away.
There’s nothing like being perceived by a third party to realize how far you’ve gone. “That was so weird,” Lindsay and Josh agree, with a nervous laugh. They reassure each other that Ashley and Austin didn’t see anything because there was nothing to see; after all, couples fight. “It’s normal,” they tell themselves, as they pick up what remains of the room. Josh gets a call from the club’s new owner, Chairwoman Park (the great Youn Yuh-jung), whose arrival the following day has the whole staff on edge. It’s just a check-in about arrangements, but the call makes the couple feel like they were caught red-handed. And they were, just not by the chairwoman. Austin wants to go to the cops since it’s the right thing to do, but Ashley is too worried about her job. Unlike Austin, who supplements his part-time gig at the club with personal-training sessions, Ashley is at the Monte Vista every single day. She decides they should stay out of it.
If, in Lindsay and Josh’s marriage, harmony has long disappeared, Ashley and Austin, recently engaged, complement each other: She is a pragmatist, he an optimist. They are obsessed with each other. At a staff meeting before Chairwoman Park’s arrival, Josh tells club employees that new ownership means potential layoffs. He walks toward Ashley as she sends increasingly desperate texts to Austin, worried that Josh is targeting her specifically. Austin threatens to go over and confront the man himself, but ultimately, Josh walks away. He ends the meeting with a pointed reminder to use “no phones, unless it’s work-related.”
Meanwhile, at home, Austin’s client cancels his physical-therapy sessions for the rest of the year so he can focus on “buying property in Dubai” because of “late-stage capitalism, haha.” Screen-life sequences, which were already put to use in the first season, return to give insight into a character’s psyche. After he fails to save a bee, Austin texts Ashley: “A bee died in the house. I cried.” When she texts back that she’s putting away her phone because of Josh’s callout, he types out and deletes a series of responses: “Should I call the cops? How can I help?” then “Are you mad at me?” and finally, “Ok. I love you.” Charles Melton, whose criminally under-recognized performance in Todd Haynes’s May December should have made him into the most in-demand young actor working today, portrays Austin’s desperate purposelessness with a hilarious, heart-aching honesty.
Misguided by his good intentions, and breaking the agreement he had made with Ashley, Austin drives to Lindsay’s house. He finds her sitting amid an unreasonable number of pillows, making affirmations to herself about the club room she is decorating specially for Chairwoman Park, hoping to land an interior-design project with the owner. Austin arrives in the shortest shorts known to man to offer her “a safe space” and remind her she is “not alone.” Lindsay assures him that he and Ashley still “have a good fight coming.” After all, she says, it’s only the couples who “go at it” who last; the ones who don’t are “usually hiding something.” She gives him a hideous pillow for his trouble. “I love it,” he says.
Though Lindsay’s marriage is not exactly the model of happiness, in her twisted way, she has a point: Ashley and Austin’s honeymoon phase can’t last forever. Back at the club, Josh seeks out Ashley (“Claw me,” he greets her, asking for a White Claw). Josh tries to bribe Ashley with $100, offering it as a tip, but she doesn’t take it. She is sweet but firm: There’s fight in her eyes. Josh intones that she could get fired if word of what she saw got out. He calls the country club “the land of make-belief,” a place made to sell the same external placidity that can disguise the rot of a marriage. “I want to make-believe, sir,” she reassures him. Satisfied with her answer, Josh leaves her to go meet Chairwoman Park, but not before asking her to pick up some stray golf balls on the hill.
If Josh and Lindsay can wield their power over Ashley and Austin, they are not at the top of the food chain, either; this tension is what makes their conflict so engaging. Chairwoman Park doesn’t like the room Lindsay decorated for her. The wallpapers, which Lindsay picked because they reminded her of her family’s cottage in Cornwall, where her brother first got the idea for the Pulitzer Prize–winning, British-gibberish-sounding Bloomscully, and the reupholstered vintage furniture, are too “colonial” for Park. Lindsay mistakes it for a compliment, but Park will have it all redone by someone else. Josh tries to comfort his wife, to no avail, while reminding her that he needs to appease the Chairwoman since his contract hasn’t yet been renewed.
Josh’s friendship with Troy is another reminder of his place in the pecking order. Troy and his wife, Ava, might invite Josh and Lindsay on weekend trips and tell them details about their sex life, but they never forget that Josh is staff, as Lindsay puts it, and they are the paying customer. Though Troy assures Josh that if the new owner threatened to fire him, the whole membership would organize a petition, he also asks Josh to look into why the food in the restaurant was lukewarm and soggy that day. Meanwhile, Lindsay leverages her own position in the club by flirting with the new tennis pro, Woosh, over text. Woosh is not the only man Lindsay flirts with over text: She has a bit of a roster, which includes Desmond, an ex-boyfriend and a Duke going through a divorce. Lindsay looks at old photos of them online with a half-wistful, half-embittered expression, but ultimately blocks him. She blocks any guy who wants to meet up, as if the suggestion is a step too far.
Back in the club, while picking up balls and texting Austin — who is now worried that they never fight — Ashley gets an abdominal cramp so bad, it makes her puke. At the doctor’s office, she learns she has an ovarian cyst that is twisting her ovary, which is causing the pain and could be fatal if not corrected with surgery. It also might make it hard for her to get pregnant. The doctor delivers this news with the signature indifference of a gynecologist. Ashley’s first worry is that she doesn’t have health insurance. Waiting for Austin to pick her up, she calls her dad for advice, but he is too busy hosting a game-watching party with his wife to hear what she has to say, or to be excited when she suggests they should have an engagement party. In fact, her father’s wife calls Austin her “boyfriend.”
At first, Ashley tells Austin it was just an upset stomach, but later, she tells him the truth. In a weird way, it calms his nerves. Sensing her distance, and maybe thinking about what Lindsay said earlier about secrets, he’d taken to Reddit, where he searched “fiancee weird sex why,” then “fiancee and i never fight why” and, most concerning (if funniest) of all, “parents never fought mom hit me why.” Ashley explains that she was worried he would break up with her when she told him it might be hard for them to get pregnant, “the one basic thing that everything is about everywhere.” Austin wants to reassure her with feeling (they don’t need anything but “each other and the beach”), but Ashley is worried about practical things, like how to pay for the surgery without insurance. She doesn’t even have a high-school diploma. Remembering what his client said earlier about “late-stage capitalism,” Austin blames their situation on “the system,” which is “designed to make you feel despair.” Nowhere is the fact that “the people in charge have made it impossible for us” than in the country club, where an “abuser” like Josh makes the most money while the rest of the staff gets left behind. To Austin, that realization means they should “get out and vote,” but Ashley gets other ideas. They have to take their share back. Next thing we see, they are at their boss’s doorstep.
• When Austin goes to see Lindsay at his house, he quips, “A pillow fight would go crazy right now.” Jin is so good at these zingers, and so far, no actor has let him down on delivery.
• Despite the fact that Austin’s character is presented as a harmless, innocent guy with good intentions (if poor execution), the very first image in this episode foreshadows the potential for his dark side: He steps on a line of working ants. What will it take for Austin to officially flip out?
• Last season, Amy had to grit her teeth through microaggressions coming from Jordana Forster (Maria Bello), the millionaire heiress who dragged on an offer to buy her business. So far in this season, it’s Lindsay and Josh on the microaggression chair: He corrects her when she calls porcelain “china” in front of Chairwoman Park, who is Korean. And there is Lindsay’s hostile accusations toward her pillow, “a cheaply made Chinese fire hazard.”
• During the opening fight sequence, Josh tells Lindsay that it’s a good thing they never had kids, as she is “an empty, selfish woman.” The accusation really gets to her, and later, after she’s been thinking about Desmond, we see her put away a baby’s onesie in her closet. The seed for this plotline parallels Ashley’s own concerns about childbearing in light of her cyst.
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