Rage match

• Published date: 04 April 2023
• Publication title: Signal

THERE’S a lot to love about Beef, the new A24/Netflix show (out Thursday) you’re going to spend the next few weeks hearing about, but one of my favourites is how clearly and surely it looks LA in the eye. We all know the facts: there are only three cities in the world, and those are LA, London and New York. I have never heard of another city in my entire life. And in recent years, TV shows that set themselves in these places (so: 95% of all TV shows) have been knowingly shy about it, as if they are an Oxford undergraduate refusing to admit their dad is rich: yes, these shows say, yes we are in London. But look! We’re not in the posh or obvious bits, all right! Look, here’s Victoria Park! Here’s Larry’s in Peckham! Didn’t expect that, did you

Beef is not like this. The central, well, beef — down-on-his-luck handyman Steven Yeun and up-on-her-luck-but-unsatisfied-anyway plant artist Ali Wong get into a road rage altercation that overtakes both of their lives (what a pitch!) — is completely of and informed by LA, a city that can only be navigated angrily in a car. On the side of Wong’s Amy, there’s a perfect lampooning of luxe-hippy culture: dinner club mushroom trips, vaping weed cross-legged in a business meeting before perusing a panic room catalogue, big floppy hats and beautiful cardigans, intimacy exercises, thinking your toddler is an artist, extremely expensive chairs.

Yeun’s Danny lives in the flipside of a divided city: having a cousin you can’t really trust, outdoor weightlifting, flickering motel lights and wonky signage, cash-in-hand jobs, having the main thing you own be a van from 2006, fast food for most meals and not really knowing what your credit score is, trying to find absolution in the church. When they collide in the opening scenes — and devolve into the resulting feud that guides and energises them both throughout the series — you see two people at the end of two very different sets of nerves, both powered by the same fuel.

If that sounds exhausting, it isn’t. Beef, despite the name and all the promotional shots of Wong and Yeun screaming at each other, rarely descends into unnecessary yelling (something has happened to me over the past couple of years where I don’t really enjoy watching people yell on TV now.) Instead, what it does is so much subtler and cleverer...