Steven Yeun And Ali Wong Are A Must-Watch In ‘Beef,’ Netflix’s New 98% Rated Show

While I may criticize Netflix pretty consistently for their content decisions, sometimes they knock things out of the park. Such is the case with their acquisition of A24’s Beef, which stars Oscar nominee and Walking Dead non-survivor Steven Yeun and comedian Ali Wong as two rivals that go to war against each other after a road rage incident causes both of them to snap.

Even though I’m only halfway through the series right now, it’s already something I can absolutely recommend, and I’m not alone. Currently Beef has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes with what I believe is just a single negative review out of dozens. It also has a near-matching 97% audience score. I know everyone loves to bag on Rotten Tomatoes and its importance these days, but I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize that when both scores are that high, there’s something absolutely worth watching there. This is Arcane/Cyberpunk Edgerunners range, for reference.

I cannot speak highly of both performances here. Steven Yeun is an incredible actor, and while it was positively stupid for AMC to kill him off The Walking Dead the way he did (even if it was faithful to the source material) that allowed him to rise to his full potential with his well deserved Oscar nomination for Minari, the first Asian-American to ever land a Best Actor nom (he lost to the legendary Anthony Hopkins). Here he plays Danny, a scheming handyman with designs on raising enough ill-gotten cash to buy property for his family in the US.

But equally impressive here is Ali Wong as Amy, who I know best from her comedy, but the performance she gives here as a woman barely masking her explosive rage while also harboring deep sadness as a wife and mother and overworked business owner is just phenomenal. Given that I’m halfway through the show, I don’t know what the future holds for Yeun and Wong’s characters, but their rivalry is only part of the story and it’s mainly about the sorrow and insanity of their respective lives.

Everything I’m seeing here seems to indicate that this show deserves all the praise it’s getting, and of course it’s hugely significant it’s an almost entirely Asian cast and created by Lee Sung Jin. I have no real idea if this is meant to be an ongoing series or a limited one-off, but if they want to tell more stories with this cast, Netflix should absolutely greenlight that immediately. It’s too early to see if this will attract enough attention to be a populist hit (it’s debuted at #2 only behind megahit The Night Agent, which is solid), but again, the quality is out of this world compared to most other Netflix productions. Emmys all around, if you ask me.

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