Beef: Season 2 First Reviews: The Destination is Well Worth the Journey
Critics say Season 2 maintains the electric unpredictability, but also demonstrates the difficulty of catching lightning in a bottle twice.
The award-winning series Beef is back for a second season, and the first reviews mainly agree that it’s worth the return. Lee Sung Jin’s anthology Netflix drama delivers a new story and cast this time, with Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Cailee Spaeny, and Charles Melton leading the narrative as clashing couples employed at an exclusive country club. The show’s plot is being criticized for being too much, but the performances are said to make it another watchable installment. Fans should understand that the first season was going to be hard to top anyway.
Here’s what critics are saying about Beef: Season 2:
Does it live up to the expectations left by the first season?
It’s every bit the excruciating masterpiece the first season was. Everything you hoped would come back to this series does.
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
It remains a compelling look at ambition and avarice gone awry…Beef: Season 2 serves up another deliciously savage hunk of drama for you to sink your teeth into.
— James Mottram, NME
Beef Season 2 still maintains the electric unpredictability that is becoming a hallmark of the show.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
It’s a comic crime saga that demonstrates the difficulty of catching lightning in a bottle twice.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
I’m sorry to say I was disappointed with this, but that has more to do with how brilliant Season 1 was than what Season 2 delivers.
— Karina Adelgaard, Heaven of Horror
As a successor to a cultural phenomenon, Season 2 is a bit of a disappointment.
— Sara Clements, Next Best Picture
The wait for the third season… doesn’t feel particularly worth it, the show feeling stagnant.
— Tyler Doster, AwardsWatch
How does Season 2 compare to Season 1?
Season 1 of Beef was a masterful stroke of absurdity and consequence, but Season 2 is even better…There’s just more, well, meat here.
— Erik Anderson, AwardsWatch
If Beef Season 1 felt like watching an unsupervised pot repeatedly boil over, the second season operates at a well-maintained simmer.
— Allison Picurro, TV Guide
Beef Season 2 succeeds in cutting a distinct figure [compared] to its predecessor, but there are plenty of thematic connections.
— David Craig, Radio Times
There’s a lack of cohesion that stands in stark contrast to the tighter storytelling of its predecessor.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
While the new episodes don’t offer quite the same depth of character or adrenaline rush as the original, the show remains a sharply observed, virtuosically acted, and artfully shot study of human behavior at its ugliest.
— Judy Berman, TIME Magazine
It’s a weaker season than the first, but no less watchable.
— Alistair Ryder, Looper.com
Does it also just go bigger?
It’s a bigger season and, defying the odds, a better one.
— Ben Travers, IndieWire
Beef Season 1 held a mirror to everything we tend to worry over or take for granted…Season 2 takes this to the next level.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
Season 2 feels more like a Grand American Story, a parable about the destructive force of capitalism and how striving for something that seems better may just leave you worse off.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
In a bigger, more focused Season 2, that great show has finally revealed itself.
— Allison Picurro, TV Guide
It would have been nice to see some bigger swings taken this time around.
— David Craig, Radio Times
This expanded version of Beef has so many centers of gravity that the whole enterprise starts feeling adrift.
— Alison Herman, Variety
Is the tone a lot different?
Darker…just a sadder vibe.
— Karina Adelgaard, Heaven of Horror
The beef here is far less external; while Yeun and Wong kept going at each other with reactionary fervor, this season feels more like a slow burn of sniffing around into others’ business.
— Sara Clements, Next Best Picture
Beef makes use of its real secret weapon: a preternatural control of tone, swinging confidently from acidic to emotional to darkly humorous at the drop of a hat.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
How is the writing this season?
Lee expands on his interest in themes of marriage dynamics and class disparity. Those ideas are threaded together here even more elegantly than they were the first time around.
— Allison Picurro, TV Guide
Jin has big ideas to play with and trenchant aspects of contemporary American culture to pick apart…[in] a story that begins tightly contained and spins wildly and intentionally out of control.
— Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
It’s a lot of story, and this sprawling narrative doesn’t always work in Beef‘s favor.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
The plot turns can feel contrived even before the introduction of an incompetent cosmetic surgeon.
— James Jackson, The Times
Beef is never dull, but it’s not nearly as deep as it intends to be.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Is this season just as funny as the first?
Lee maintains Beef‘s acidic sense of humor in its sophomore season, poking fun at both couples to great effect.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
Though Beef isn’t exclusively a dark comedy, its comic beats thrive with a tighter pace and stricter focus.
— Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
You won’t know whether to recoil in disgust or laugh at the absurdity on display, but such unpredictability only makes this even more appealing to binge-watch in as few sittings as possible.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
It doesn’t utilize the dark comedy edge nearly as much this time around. This is a real shame.
— Karina Adelgaard, Heaven of Horror
Will we like any of the characters?
Anyone who thinks we need likeable heroes and the purest of protagonists to root for is likely in for a rude awakening here.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
Lee takes his characters to their extremes, but they never stop being unmistakably human.
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
Mulligan’s brittle Lindsay — a study in frustrated fury — may be unlikeable, but she is also compelling, nailing the marital doubts that can amplify in midlife.
— James Jackson, The Times
Everyone, rich or poor, is so unlikeable leaves no one to root for.
— Pat Stacey, Irish Independent
How is the cast this time?
The new cast is truly amazing.
— Karina Adelgaard, Heaven of Horror
Four exceptional lead performances that will be among the year’s very best.
— Alistair Ryder, Looper.com
Suffice it to say that the main quartet of Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, and Charles Melton more than holds up their end of the bargain.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
The performances are uniformly and unsurprisingly excellent…just professionals demonstrating why their success is so justified.
— Alison Herman, Variety
They’re not only watchable, they create a sense of what the characters are thinking—or not thinking—in some of the quieter moments.
— Karen Gordon, Original Cin
All four performances are strong, but mostly resemble business-as-usual for these actors, which is disappointing when Season 1 was such a radical departure for both Yeun and Wong.
— David Craig, Radio Times
Does anyone in the ensemble stand out?
The season belongs to a never-better Isaac. He gives a knockout performance from beginning to end.
— Allison Picurro, TV Guide
It’s Isaac who gets the more deserving showcase, especially after years where it’s felt like Hollywood has had no idea what to do with him.
— Alistair Ryder, Looper.com
Mulligan is truly exceptional here, doing some career-best work.
— Erik Anderson, AwardsWatch
The clear exception is Melton, who showcases impressive comic talent as the rather dim-witted Austin.
— David Craig, Radio Times
The way Spaeny balances her character’s ferocity and terror create some of the season’s heartiest laughs and most moving revelations.
— Ben Travers, IndieWire
How does this season look?
The season is spectacularly shot by Moonlight cinematographer James Laxton, lensing raw intimacy as deftly as moments of surrealism.
— Erik Anderson, AwardsWatch
Lee and his co-directors, Jake Schreier and Kitao Sakurai, maintain a sleek visual style that evolves as the series progresses.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
This continues to be a show that doesn’t merely tell its story well, but knows how to dazzle as it does so.
— Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
Does this season end on a high note?
Believe me when I say that the destination is well worth the journey.
— Tyler Doster, AwardsWatch
Season 1’s harrowing masterpiece of a two-hander finale would’ve been impossible to replicate. So Lee smartly escalates in a different direction, ramping up to a stylish, Korea-set climax that recalls the anticapitalist thrillers, like Bong’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, for which that country’s film industry is known.
— Judy Berman, TIME Magazine
Beef builds to it so efficiently that the genre jumping feels as surprising as it does inevitable.
— Allison Picurro, TV Guide
The final stretch of the season takes things in a Coen Brothers-inspired direction.
— Alistair Ryder, Looper.com
Perilous situations and a bit of aesthetic razzle-dazzle help distract attention away from the ho-humness of the narrative’s resolution.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
If the entire show had maintained the energy of its final episode, it could have been great.
— Sara Clements, Next Best Picture
Does it leave us wanting a third season?
Lee Sung Jin has proven without doubt that Beef works as an anthology and, with any luck, there will be more sizzling, bloody servings to come.
— David Craig, Radio Times
The show left me with so much to think about and so many details to be amused by that I hope Lee Sung Jin has the opportunity to show us what else Beef can be.
— Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
It’s a lot of story, and this sprawling narrative doesn’t always work in Beef‘s favor.
— Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant
If we can go back to smaller-scale character drama next time, the series will be much stronger for it.
— Alistair Ryder, Looper.com
BShould the series continue onward, it’d be wise to plumb personal and social ills by again tapping into the everyday rage and frustrations—and the minor conflicts that escalate into major crises—that were the lifeblood of its breakout debut.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Beef: Season 2 premieres on Netflix on April 16.
