The first time I noticed Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I discovered myself sitting up just a little straighter and leaning just a little nearer towards my TV. I knew Wong had a starring position, however Amy caught me off guard. Wearing a cream-colored bucket hat, her fingers gripping the steering wheel and her face frozen in worry, she appeared nothing like what I anticipated of the faceless driver I’d simply watched in the present’s opening minutes—the one who’d careened recklessly throughout lanes, taunting, threatening, and throwing trash at a stranger.
Then once more, Beef likes toying with assumptions of who its characters could be and the place its story would possibly veer subsequent. The half-hour-episode Netflix collection from the first-time showrunner Lee Sung Jin (Silicon Valley) is tough to categorize; it’s concurrently a black comedy, a home drama, and a psychological thriller. It begins with a road-rage incident that Amy units off when she flips the hen at Danny (Steven Yeun) in a car parking zone after he almost backs his truck into her Benz. Like a gnarlier Changing Lanes, their ensuing feud results in an escalating collection of vengeful acts that construct from petty pranks into horrifying, morally questionable schemes. That the present feels balanced in any respect is all the way down to how nicely drawn each leads are. Amy is a rich entrepreneur with a loving husband, a cute daughter, and a state-of-the-art mansion. Danny is a contractor barely making hire who shares a cramped condominium along with his slacker brother. Both are deeply, desperately sad.
Yet of the 2, Amy is much less instantly sympathetic. Danny lives a tough paycheck-to-paycheck way of life, his each failure deepening his perception that the world works towards him. Amy, in the meantime, has no apparent purpose to be depressing. She has all of it—if “all” is outlined as a stellar profession and a nuclear household. Lee, who was impressed to create the collection after getting caught in a road-rage incident himself, initially conceived of the character as a white man, matching the id of the driving force he’d encountered in actual life. But rapidly—in “maybe half a day,” Lee instructed me over the cellphone—he dropped the thought; he didn’t need the collection to be merely about racial dynamics or to boil all the way down to a tradition conflict. Later, with Wong in thoughts, he envisioned a brand new character: a lady whose self-made success is the reason for her downfall. Not that Beef tears Amy aside; as an alternative, the collection grants her increasingly achievements, dissecting how her suffocating ambition pushes her to behave on her worst impulses towards an entire stranger. She is TV’s most compelling antiheroine of late: somebody who is aware of she’s her personal worst enemy and who, as Lee defined, “feels very much trapped in a maze of her own creation.”
Consider how Amy consistently questions her energy and instinctively tries to cover that self-doubt. She might look like a Strong Modern Woman—she agrees to photographs with followers and participates in glitzy panels about feminine entrepreneurs, the place she says issues like “Despite what everybody tells you, you can have it all!”—however she’s uncomfortable with the picture. The present doesn’t place her in a male-dominated discipline; she owns an artsy, minimalist plant enterprise, and she or he’s engaged on promoting her firm to the feminine proprietor of a retail chain. In the presence of equally well-off girls, she wears a everlasting smile by gritted tooth. She clothes in mushy knits and unwrinkled silks, as if to distance herself from the girlboss uniform of energy fits and pencil skirts. “There was something interesting to us as writers about someone who has so much chaos going on inside but [who’s] trying to cover that with as much calm and people-appeasing energy as possible,” Lee mentioned. Amy is aware of that expressing her discontent together with her apparently good life would break folks’s impression of her as a job mannequin. And regardless of her reluctance to play the half, she likes understanding that she is taken into account an inspiration.
Besides, when she does attempt to clarify how she feels, the folks closest to her can’t perceive why she’s uneasy. In one wrenching scene, Amy divulges her malaise to her husband, George (Joseph Lee). “There’s this feeling I’ve had for a long time,” she says, squeezing out her phrases between pauses. “I don’t remember when it started; I can’t pinpoint exactly when or why … It feels like the ground, but, like, right here.” She gestures to her chest as she begins to cry. George reacts in a supportive method: “I know a lot of people who battled depression and won,” he says—however the assertion solely causes Amy to close their dialog down. His phrases are too constructive, too insistent that she beat no matter she’s obtained. Through her, Beef highlights an advanced twist on loneliness: Amy has a wholesome community of family members, however the extra encouraging they’re, the more serious she feels. She’s lucky to have a doting husband and the means to hunt assist. So why can’t she do what’s anticipated of her and really feel higher?
The concept that existential unhappiness can come for anybody is private for Lee: He instructed me that the scene of Amy’s confession got here immediately from a second within the writers’ room throughout which he tried to explain his personal anxiousness, and ended up weeping in entrance of the employees. Like Amy, Lee hasn’t been in a position to shake off the load in his chest: “That feeling is still very much there. It doesn’t go away … Writing this character was figuring out a way to accept that—that for some of us, that feeling is just permanent.” Amy’s makes an attempt to search out catharsis lead her to make choices that vary from farcical to scary, if not outright legal. In her, Lee conveys the joys and desperation of that endless seek for launch—a journey that pushes Beef ahead, step by fascinating step. Wong sells every of them. She’s by no means been funnier, or extra heartbreaking.