‘Beef’ is back with searing second season, inspired by real-life shouting match
Lee Sung Jin is not inherently cocksure. If anything, the “Beef” creator defaults to self-deprecation.
Take the 44-year-old’s penchant for spinning fiction out of real-life occurrences. “I have a very limited imagination,” Lee deadpans. “I kind of have to wait for the universe to show me things.” Reflecting on his experience making Season 1 of “Beef,” the zeitgeist-seizing Netflix anthology that yielded eight Emmys and 13 nominations in 2023, Lee cites an online meme of a Venn diagram. “Crippling self-doubt” sits in one circle. “Absolute narcissism” occupies the other. The overlap? “Art.”
“That,” he says with a laugh, “was the process.”
Yet Lee recalls feeling unusually assured when he gathered his writers for “Beef,” a darkly comic psychodrama about a road-rage incident and the all-consuming rivalry that ensues. Pulling up an email to his staff from April 23, 2021, Lee cringes at the bravado but marvels at the prescience.
Here we are, the greatest writers’ room ever assembled. The Television Academy will want a copy of this email after we make the best show of all time that gets nominated for 15 Emmys.
“I was off by two,” Lee quips. “It was one of those things where you just intuitively can feel when you’re tapped into something. It truly isn’t even an arrogance thing. You just feel like you’re channeling something from above — something bigger than you.”
Lee says he embarked on Season 2 with comparable confidence — even if he acknowledges feeling the nerves as we grab lunch at his D.C. hotel, shortly before all eight episodes hit Netflix on Thursday. (Lee was in town for a screening of the show hosted by Netflix and the Korean Cultural Center.) You wouldn’t sense any anxiety from his demeanor: Serene and insightful, the bespectacled Lee exudes both the otherworldly wit that permeates the show’s biting humor and a disarming warmth that belies his outsize creative reputation.
Starting from scratch, Season 2 of “Beef” introduces a pair of warring couples who have crossed paths at a lavish California country club. Engaged Gen Zers Ashley (played by Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) stumble upon married millennials Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) in a disturbing tussle veering toward violence, and the incident sparks a chain reaction of explosive events.
Spanning Los Angeles and Seoul, the second season makes for another thorny negotiation of the human condition. The capitalist systems fueling socioeconomic inequality go under the microscope. The same goes for the American health care system and South Korea’s cosmetic surgery industry. Lee also serves up a multipronged interrogation of how domestic bliss can crumble, over time or all at once.
The result still feels like “Beef” — the unhinged feuding, the black comedy, the dashes of surrealism, the jolts of violence, the cultural commentary — while carving its own identity.
“Sonny doesn’t want to repeat himself, and he’ll never repeat himself,” says Melton, referring to Lee by his nickname. “Sonny experiences life, and has such a deep emotional sensitivity to it and such a brilliant filter of a mind to express his artistry.”
Although “Beef” was billed as a limited series, Lee says his initial pitch included a handful of ideas for subsequent seasons. Riding high off the first installment, which was inspired by a real road-rage incident Lee experienced, he circled back to those pitches and crafted fresh ones.
One depicted a beef in a high school orchestra. Another focused on triplet sisters. Lee also imagined a family planning to rob football legend Tom Brady. The idea of following tennis doubles partners seemed appealing before the 2024 movie “Challengers” undercut the thought. One after another, the pitches were declined by Netflix executive Jinny Howe.
“She eventually pulled me aside,” Lee recalls, “and wisely told me, ‘Sonny, I can tell you’re just pitching to pitch. We can talk about a different show together. You should only do “Beef” if you find something that you’re actually really passionate about, and I’m just not feeling that for you,’ which is a brutal callout to hear from essentially your boss.”
Howe, the streamer’s vice president of original series, confirms his recollection. “Given that he works in such a unique and specific way, where it really is coming from the inside out, I was just making sure he had a moment to kind of take a beat,” she says. “He sees the world in a really unique way. It’s always illuminating. But I think [‘Beef’ had] the thing underneath it, which is, ‘Here’s what I really want to say.’”
Had Lee not found what he wanted to say, he was ready to walk away from the show. “But,” he says, “real life kind of hit me in the face.”
This time around, Lee’s Southern California neighbors offered the inspiration. Hearing a “heated debate” from one couple’s home, Lee wandered over and checked from a distance before ultimately walking away. The incident, he clarifies, wasn’t as intense as what is depicted in the show’s opening. But he was fascinated by the generation gap that emerged as he recounted the shouting match to others.
“I found that my Gen Z peers would just react so severely, being like, ‘You just call 911. I can’t believe that. Are you going to go back and check on them?’” Lee recalls. “When I told the story to people my age or older, they’d just be like, ‘I mean, who doesn’t fight?’”
It was this concept — and the layers of humanist exploration that accompanied it — that got a swift “yes” from Howe. In crafting a narrative, Lee followed the same formula as in the first season: 35% comedy and broken psychology, a la “The Sopranos” or Paul Thomas Anderson; 35% propulsion and bingeability, a la “The White Lotus”; and 30% warm pathos, a la Ingmar Bergman and Hirokazu Koreeda. And, Lee says, a season of “Beef” must also wrestle with the “shadow self,” the Carl Jung idea about the unconscious aspects of one’s psychological being.
“I think the show is almost an excavation of our shadow selves,” Lee says, “so that we all look at it and actually try to integrate it into our lives, rather than shove it and ignore it and repress it.”
Despite Lee’s auteur reputation, Melton describes a collaborator who leaned heavily on his cast — also including Korean legends Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho — for ideas. “Sonny and I would talk to 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, just about everything — life, our experiences, existentialism,” Melton says. “It’s a gift for an actor to work with a filmmaker and work with an auteur like Sonny, where there’s this innate trust.”
Such is the method of a creative mind always unearthing real-life inspiration. Case in point: The country club setting came about after Lee house sat for a friend with a membership at the Montecito Club in Santa Barbara, California. The show’s swerve into the K-beauty industry followed Lee’s experience at a Korean skin care clinic. A harrowing bottle episode set in an American emergency room — the “incompetency porn” equivalent to “The Pitt’s” competency porn, Lee jokes — was largely a beat-for-beat re-creation of a 10-hour ordeal Lee endured.
“I’m just always writing stuff down,” Lee says. “Our psychology is so complex and so interesting that there’s just an endless well everywhere.”
Jake Schreier, the “Beef” director tapped to helm Marvel’s X-Men reboot, recently revealed that Lee is writing that superpowered blockbuster with Joanna Calo. So it might be a while before a third season of “Beef” comes to fruition — if it happens at all. But, as always, Lee remains open to whatever creative spark comes his way.
“The universe,” he says, “is genius.”
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“Beef”
The second season is streaming now on Netflix.