In the 'Beef' writers room, 'intrusive thoughts' are dramatic gold

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Set us as preferred The showrunner of “Beef” describes the writers room as an “endless sleepover.” But instead of gossiping about who’s dating whom, collaborators batted around their pasts and infused the darkly comedic anthology series with themes of samsara and the Jungian Shadow.“So much of the writing process is, and I know they did this on ‘The Sopranos’ too, less about writing and more about sharing,” says Lee Sung Jin, who won three Emmys for Season 1 and is up for three more among the second season’s category-leading 16 nominations.“This show isn’t just born out of stuff from my life, but from all the writers’ lives or observations.

We spend hours and hours having an endless sleepover where we’re telling stories of a relative or something that happened in ninth grade.”Mining that kind of personal data makes sense for a series that reaches farcical extremes while remaining grounded (trapped?) in the minutiae of everyday life’s daily combat.That could mean struggling for the last of a certain flavor of sports drink or withholding access to a doctor.The main “beef” this season is between two couples: the established, middle-aged Josh and Lindsay, played by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, and the openhearted, young Austin and Ashley, played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny.

There’s also plenty of conflict within the couples, and with other forces.For instance, the show contemplates samsara, a Sanskrit term, per Merriam-Webster, for the “indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma” that features prominently in Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths.

One might say “Beef” is in the gutter but looking at the stars.Lee says they were conscious of making something different from Season 1, “not for newness’ sake, but to tap into the root of what we�...