I felt like it took me way too long to check out Beef, Netflix’s newest critically acclaimed darling that actually earned all the “most streamed” buzz that other awful shows get on that platform. Then I was a tool and watched half of it like a month ago before finally committing myself to finishing it. I have no clue why I skirted it for so long. I had liked what I’d seen so far! TV is confusing sometimes, and so are my preferences at any given time.
I had kept reading all over the place that viewers of this show finally realized in the last episode that these two characters are essentially the same, but they just mask it in a different way. Honestly, I could have told you that within the first scene of meeting both Amy and Danny. These two are clinically depressed but have tackled their demons in almost the complete opposite way. Amy buried herself in work and is now on the brink of being financially set for life if she manages to secure the deal of selling her company to a home goods mega chain. She thinks that once she achieves this goal that she could be content with her life, with her husband and young daughter, June. She’s fooling herself.
We meet Danny failing to kill himself via many lit hibachi grills in his home that he now cannot return. He knows he’s responsible for the failure of his parents motel and the reason they are back in Korea, but he cannot seem to dig himself out of this hole he’s got himself in. So you think it’s going to be a battle of the rich woman against the poor man, and while that is a big contributor to their bone to pick with each other, it’s more because they harbor this rage that they feel they can never fully express. They both feel they are being trapped by a husband whose head is in the clouds, and a couch potato of a brother, respectively. They are prisoners of their own making.
Their lives cross paths however when Danny almost backs into Amy at the store where he’s trying to return his grills. This results in some aggressive honking, flipping of the bird, and then an ultimate road rage car chase. Then the two are out for revenge back and forth for the rest of the season. It’s so funny to me that they keep in contact with each other and are hellbent on this long, drawn out torment, when a quick call to the police could have ended things immediately. There are plenty of other complicated relationships and schemes woven throughout the course of the show, but it’s Amy and Danny’s story.
The ending is not something I would have anticipated, but all you need to know is that they finally see themselves in each other. But boy, what a twist at the end! I’ve seen nowhere that this is a limited series, so I hope to god we get to see where this goes with a second season. Check it out!