This article is taken from our new weekly film and TV newsletter, INTERMISSION from GQ's culture editor Ben Allen and the crew. Sign up here to navigate the avalanche of streamer slop to find the stuff actually worth hitting play on.
Mild spoilers for Beef season two to follow.
In season two of Beef, a millennial couple’s shared midlife crisis brings about their downfall. After Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) return home late from a fundraiser at the country club Josh manages, they get into a fight about nothing and everything. A forgotten birthday is the catalyst, but it’s just enough to open the door to an overflowing wardrobe full of baggage. Their long-held plan to quit their jobs and run a “bespoke” B&B has never materialised; they stopped having sex a year ago, partly because Josh is addicted to OnlyFans; Lindsay is flirting with a couple of potential affairs. As with most couples, money is a source of anxiety, too. Josh has spent Lindsay’s inheritance on sports memorabilia, high-spec audio equipment and his now dead mother’s end-of-life care. Lindsay resents that Josh acts like he’s friends with the uber-wealthy members at the club when he’s really staff. Their sausage dog, Burberry, is mercifully spared their ire (at least for now).
The fight turns into a bit of a wrestling match, and just when Josh disarms Lindsay of the golf club she’s threatening him with, they realise they’re being watched – by Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a couple in their 20s who also work at the club and cannot, at that point in their lives, even begin to understand what they’re witnessing. Not only that, Ashley is filming the interaction, and will later use it as blackmail in order to shimmy her way up the greasy pole at work. Herein lies the titular beef, split down generational lines, which escalates at an alarming rate as the episodes wear on. This beef is the source of all the funniest and most compelling drama here, and all four of the main actors are excellent.
Josh and Lindsay are suitable poster children for the dawn of the “millennial cringe” era, so richly and painfully realised as they are by creator/writer Lee Sung Jin, himself an elder millennial at 44. While he casts a wide net for satire, this season’s best writing by miles is reserved for making fun of them. Do you enjoy the musical stylings of Hot Chip? Is your favourite drug MDMA? Did the world promise you things a faltering global economy couldn’t deliver on? You might find this show as triggering as I did.
Here are some of the note-perfect details Sung Jin conjures: Josh and Lindsay have a framed Coachella lineup poster on their wall, and matching tattoos of the date they saw LCD Soundsystem in 2010, under the influence of “The best molly we’ve ever had. By far!” Josh, who gets the lion’s share of the embarrassment, is a wannabe DJ, and we watch him making terrible beats on Ableton in a raggedy dressing gown. At one point, Lindsay walks in on him playing something out loud on his phone – he’s embarrassed to tell her that it’s a self-help podcast. “Listening to a podcast in your little shed isn’t working on shit, Josh!” she tells him. Even the soundtrack choices are bait, like Flume’s remix of Disclosure’s “You & Me”, an early 2010s festival mainstay, which plays over the credits of episode one.
Beyond these little sharp jabs, their millennial essence is integral to the story. Though they have pretty much everything they need, they grasp for more – a sense of fulfilment they believe they deserve, cooler jobs, a better story to be able to tell at parties. It’s this ennui that curdles into resentment towards each other and ultimately brings about the fight Austin and Ashley witness. This all speaks to an interesting dramatic wrinkle that we will likely see more and more of, as the members of my generation – who have had to worry about recessions and pandemics for most of their working lives, and are maybe a little more prone to neurotic introspection – wade into their forties (the eldest millennial right now is 45). We’ve seen middle-aged ennui on screen before, sure, but not with couples versed in the language of therapy-speak. Something to look forward to.
If nothing else, Beef season two is proof that we are indeed at that generational crossroads we have feared for some time. The things that I and my fellow millennials loved in the past are now washed. We got a glimpse of it last year, when people on the internet started rinsing the stomp-clap music genre that had its heyday in the late noughties, as pioneered by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, a band I have seen live more than once. This is surely just the tip of the iceberg.
Comments (0)