Review: Feuding couples and class clashes fuel climactic Season 2 of 'Beef'

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Critically huzzahed, festooned with Emmys, the 2023 first season of “Beef” told a story of road rage escalating to warfare and finally winding down to a sort of understanding.Though he mooted future seasons with its main characters, played by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, creator Lee Sung Jin has instead returned with an unconnected fresh story, premiering Thursday on Netflix.

It offers a new cast of antagonistic protagonists, characters designed, as the title implies, for argument (and intermittent conciliation); alternating moods of tension and disappointment, with brief passages of relief.As such, it’s the sort of show with which the viewer may find himself arguing, asking why these people just can’t act reasonably, and why am I watching.But because, as before, it’s (mostly) the characters one despairs of rather than the series itself — which is well wrought and very well acted and knows its business, whether you like it or not — the new “Beef” may be accounted on its own terms a success.

(Still, that it runs eight episodes as opposed to the first season’s 10 is not a bad thing.) Television ‘Beef,’ now on Netflix, and ‘Am I Being Unreasonable?,’ premiering Tuesday on Hulu, are such convincing portraits of frustration that they’re hard to dismiss.The narrative centers on two couples, who war, often subtly, with themselves and one another — elder millennials Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) and the Gen Z Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) — though at times someone from one faction will find themselves sympathetic to or even allied with someone from the other.(Realignments are ongoing.) The action takes place around an exclusive Montecito country club — $300K initiation fee — where Josh is the much-liked general manager and Ashley a low-level employee in the “food and beverage” department whose mobility is ham...