Beef: Anatomy of a Feud is a custom video produced by Ankler Media executive producer of brand experiences Jennifer Laski. This video is presented by Netflix.
It takes a little bit of math to create something as singular as Beef.
“We have a formula that we talk about in the room — I think I came up with the season one as a joke, and it somehow stuck,” creator Lee Sung Jin tells Ankler awards editor and Prestige Junkie host Katey Rich. “We said it’s 35 percent early Sopranos and early Paul Thomas Anderson comedy, where you’re laughing at the broken psychology of people; plus 35 percent Netflix propulsion and The White Lotus water cooler moments; plus 30 percent Ingmar Bergman and Hirokazu Kore-eda, warm melancholic pathos. We actually go through our scripts to make sure, roughly percentage-wise, that’s there.”
But the challenge of creating a follow-up to the Emmy-winning first season of the Netflix limited series — which won eight awards, including three for Lee as writer, director and executive producer — was to subvert expectations. “We wanted the feeling of this season to almost be an inverse of last season,” says Lee, who goes by Sonny to friends and collaborators. “For all of us, we don’t like repeating ourselves.”
Season one, which was based on a real-life road rage incident Lee experienced, focused on the increasingly adversarial relationship between a struggling contractor (Steven Yeun) and a wealthy small business owner (Ali Wong); season two’s story follows a foursome — a millennial couple in the last stages of their marriage (played by Emmy nominees Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) warring with a Gen Z pair at a crossroads in their relationship (played by Emmy nominee Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny).
“When I think about my favorite musicians growing up, when the sophomore album was just the debut album over again, I started to lose interest,” says Lee. “Certainly, it would have been easier and would have saved a lot of time to just do like another aggressive customer service beef. But we’re just trying to always talk about how to push ourselves past what we’ve done before.”
Nominated for 16 Emmys this year — including best limited series and best writing and directing for Lee — Beef reunited Lee with many previous collaborators, including director and executive producer Jake Schreier and editor Laura Zempel, who won for season one and is again nominated for season two.
“I know his sense of humor pretty well, and he and I are very similar in that we like to laugh at things that we probably shouldn’t laugh at,” Zempel says. “So I’m always trying to make myself laugh, and then hopefully make Sonny laugh in basically any scene that I cut. But I think we were so lucky with the actors that we had; they can do anything. It was just an embarrassment of riches.”
Season two of Beef includes not just its main quartet, but Oscar-winning actress Youn Yuh-jung and Parasite star Song Kang-ho — plus breakouts like Seoyeon Jang (as Eunice, a character who catches the eye of Melton’s Austin) and Mikaela Hoover (as Ava, a millennial trophy wife).
“Working with Sonny is so great because he just has such a great understanding of what he’s looking for, and also an ability to communicate that, which isn’t always the case,” says casting director Jeanie Bacharach, a 12-time Emmy nominee and three-time winner (The Bear, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). “It was just building a trust and a vocabulary with each other — how do we make these people feel elevated and yet grounded in this world?”
In creating season two, Lee once again used real-life inspiration to spark some Beef fiction. The idea to center on an argument with far-reaching ramifications for an entire community was born of a disagreement Lee overheard while walking through his neighborhood. And the impetus to set an episode inside a hospital waiting room — episode four, “Oh, The Comfort, The Inexpressible Comfort,” which netted Lee his directing Emmy nomination — sprang from Lee’s own 11-hour experience at an L.A. hospital.
“To me, that episode is a documentary. Like, almost every beat happened,” Lee says. He had spent hours in the emergency room, and saw all manner of patients — and talked to Bacharach about finding the right actors for the parts. “That was fun — I was like, ‘There was a teenager with a bandaged head and sunglasses,’” he says. “We got really specific with the day players and extras.”
Lee also chose to direct the episode as a challenge to himself. “I wanted to be able to push the language of the show in a way that I had been envisioning, and that’s probably one of the most fun weeks of the shoot — because when we were also in one location the entire time.” Still, he gives credit to Zempel and cinematographer James Laxton, a fellow Emmy nominee, for landing the episode’s final beats — when Spaeny’s Ashley breaks into Josh and Lindsay’s house and accidentally lets their dog escape. “I was just like, ‘It’s good. I don’t need to change anything.’”
“There are a lot of different genres we’re playing with in that episode more than in the other episodes we do,” Laxton adds. “That’s the strength of Beef in many ways. The visual sort of language does get to morph from one thing to the next — it’s a lot of fun.”
