Thrumming with Dark Vigor, Beef Is a Terrific Rebound for Netflix

There’s a great scene toward the very end of The Wire when Marlo Stanfield, the former drug kingpin who dodges jail time and attempts to become a straight businessman, leaves a meeting dressed in a suit, walks the streets of west Baltimore, and approaches two dealers on a street corner. “The f— you looking at?” he asks, unprompted. A moment later, one of the dealers draws a gun, Marlo wrestles it away, and gets grazed on the arm as he drives the dealers off the corner. He’s left standing by himself in the glow of the streetlight, and analysis of the scene often depicts Marlo as wistful or defeated in this moment—the king of nothing, without even a reputation like dead nemesis Omar. There’s truth to that, but I see something more. In his smile, there’s the sense of returning to life; he’s been shot, yes, and he’s lost his street status, but he’s once again found himself where he wants to be, and where he feels most alive: In a fight. The sense of electricity he feels in that moment is worth more than all the millions he acquired.

There’s an argument to be made that struggle and conflict is at the heart of the human condition, perhaps more so for someone born to a hard life like Marlo than for others who live more comfortably, but still fundamental and even necessary for fulfillment. At the end of the first episode of the new Netflix series Beef, the brilliant Ali Wong, playing the well-off boutique entrepreneur Amy Lau, has become engaged in a feud with the suicidal contractor Danny Cho, played by Steven Yeun. It started with an instance of road rage, in which Lau almost kills Cho, and escalates when Cho, pretending to do his nemesis a favor, gets access to her home and urinates all over the bathroom floor. Enraged, Lau chases him to his truck, but Cho is too fast, and he gives her the finger as he speeds away. And however this sounds, wrapped in the language of plain description, be advised: It’s one of the most invigorating sequences on TV in the past year.

Why? Pick a thousand reasons: the slow-motion footage, complete with Wong’s enraged cursing as she holds back her olive dress; Yeun’s delirious grin; the almost too-perfect musical choice of Hoobastank’s “The Reason;” and, best of all, just before the action flashes to the credits, the flash of a smile on Wong’s face.

From this scene alone, you know you’re in expert hands, and it all hearkens back to that scene from The Wire: in their own ways, the two main characters are trapped and desperate in their lives, victims of circumstance and more powerful forces. One is rich, and one is poor, but fundamentally they’re both prisoners who feel no sense of control of their lives. What this short moment shows is that, briefly, they are resuscitated; they need this. It’s not healthy, it’s going to harm them both, but you know beyond any doubt that they are going to chase this high as long as they can. A raw thrill brought them both back to life, from a chance encounter in a parking lot, and through it they’ll even come to depend on each other.

As far as premise-setting, you just can’t do it any better, and there’s very little that you need to know about the show beyond that. They fight, and fight, and fight, and as the stifling atmosphere of modern lives continues to let them down, to leave them unhappy and confused, they’ll seek solace in each other, but that solace will come in the form of violence, because what they both require is the thrumming, hot conflict that can be waged between two people without the restrictions that society and the dual strictures of wealth and poverty have put in place. Through three episodes (out of an eventual 10), the direction and acting continue to be superb. For Ali Wong, it’s a massive coup in what has felt like a long line, and for Steven Yeun, it might even be something more; as good as he’s always been, his most notable roles have cast him as a nice guy—he has a nice-guy face—and this role proves he can channel more than his fair share of darkness when required.

This is also a big victory for Netflix, a streaming service that is raking in dollars but has fallen abysmally behind its rivals in terms of quality, and where the priority has seemed to be churning out the streaming equivalent of mass-market network dramas and comedies to capture as wide a swath of the audience as possible, while eschewing anything actually good. That’s perhaps overly broad, overly harsh, but while Apple TV+ has been on a three-year hot streak, producing winner after winner, this feels like the first time Netflix has made us pay attention critically in just as long. Whether this is the tip of the spear in a shifting of priorities is anyone’s guess, but even if it’s an anomaly, it’s nice to know that even when a streaming juggernaut seeks the path of least resistance, something brilliant can still slip through the cracks.

Beef premieres Thursday, March 6th on Netflix.

Shane Ryan is a writer and editor. You can find more of his writing and podcasting at Apocalypse Sports, and follow him on Twitter here .

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