Diandra TV Review: Beef Sears With Existential Dread & Humor
In a world, where anger feels more felt, Beef arrives as a gripping, hilarious, and oddly terrifying look as to how our personal lives make us obsess with even the minutia of tiny, supposed to be fleeting issues. We all have problems, and most of us feel so overwhelmed by them that someone cutting us on the line to Dunkin leaves us with multiple, fantasy murder scenarios. When we have more actual problem than solutions, the versus between Amy and Danny feels outrageously possible.
Created by Lee Sung Jin, with each passing episode, what was supposed to be a fender bender between two disagreeing, slightly disagreeable people becomes an outright war. Why? Because it is not just a ¨who hit who¨ or ¨ which one of us actually knows traffic law¨ scenario! It is an overarching, existential dilemma of how you can try and try to do the right thing and get the most out of life, but people are horrible and try to stop you without suffering consequences… UNDERSTAND! You see the accident was a symbol to Ali Wong´s Amy and Steven Yeun´s Danny, and oddly enough you comprehend the feeling because, again, the temptation for a homicide is casual and clear at even somebody not saying hello to your kid or calling your dog stupid.
Wong permeates with gritting charm as Amy: a self-made business guru with a picture perfect family, a beautiful home, and a draining mother in law whose overbearing meddling feeds her inner, existential emptiness. In essence, she has a shadow everyday telling her she is not enough, which, again, makes that car accident and Danny´s reaction feel like a cherry on top of a very shitty sundae. Meanwhile, Yeun is just overpoweringly magnetic as an lost man taking care of his underwhelming, kind of lazy brother, Paul (Young Manzino) who gets them in trouble with their criminally connected cousin Isaac (David Choe): again, we have someone getting in a car accident while feeling emotionally crashed into life. In a way, they were both the most distracted people to be pretending to be clear, which makes the funny upscales of their rivalry feel weirdly tragic and reflective of how our issues are not just sad…. they are boring.
It sucks to be unappreciated and demanded from by a family that you do not even know if you like at all while contemplating if there is anything lovable or salvageable to yourself and your dreams. Life is a strange thing because we all feel like we want one, while, literally, having one. We get so wrapped in our issues that, like Amy and Danny , we can start an invigoratingly toxic battle with a stranger because we just do not feel good and have lost hope that we will. Beef comes out April 6.
