THERE ARE CERTAIN everyday indignities for which there is no justice, no balancing of the karmic scales: rudeness from strangers, wasted time on hold or in a waiting room, casual sexism or racism, getting cut off on line or in traffic. If you're tuned to the frequency of loss rather than gain, the desire to just once get what you think you're owed can spin out of control quickly. Under those circumstances, a middle finger aimed out a car window could be construed as a declaration of war.
Lee Sung Jin's limited Netflix series, Beef, uses that gesture to fling us straight into the trenches of modern American malaise with Steven Yeun and Ali Wong on opposing sides of a midlife crisis that blows up into an increasingly violent existential duel. Watching Beef's ten episodes is like pushing on the edge of a bruise, a paradoxically pleasurable experience of anxiety and satisfaction, and Yeun and Wong's vibrating, hostile chemistry makes for engaging feel-bad TV that critiques the very notion of inner peace.
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