Beef

Ten half-hour episodes on Netflix, made by A24, created by Lee Sung Jin (who wrote on Silicon Valley and Dave). A parking-lot near-miss between two strangers snowballs into a private war. Steven Yeun plays Danny Cho, a contractor drowning in unpaid bills and family obligation. Ali Wong plays Amy Lau, a plant-store entrepreneur trying to sell her business to a bigger one while her home life quietly rots. First episode sets the rules: neither of them can let it go, and both have lives brittle enough that a stranger with a grudge is enough to start cracking things open.

Yeun and Wong. That's most of the pitch, and it earns the billing. Yeun does something rare, playing a guy who's petty and pitiable in the same beat without asking you to pick one. Wong, working mostly outside the stand-up register that made her famous, is the surprise: cold, controlled, occasionally terrifying. Lee Sung Jin writes dialogue that sounds like the way people actually snipe at each other in cars and kitchens, and Jake Schreier's direction on the early episodes keeps the tone knife-edged between comedy and dread. The supporting bench, David Choe and Young Mazino and Joseph Lee, does real work rather than filling frames. And the soundtrack, heavy on late-90s and early-2000s alt-rock needle drops, is the best-curated of any Netflix show that year.

It gets ugly. Not violent-ugly so much as behavior-ugly, and some viewers will find the whole thing too small and mean to spend ten episodes with. The half-hour format is generous but the middle stretch leans on subplots that don't all pull equal weight; a couple of side characters exist mostly to move the plot. If you need a protagonist to root for, you'll be uncomfortable, because the show refuses to let either lead off the hook. The final stretch takes a swing that not everyone will catch.

If you liked Fleabag for the shame-comedy, Barry for the crime-slides-into-tragedy pivot, or the Uncut Gems school of watch-through-your-fingers escalation, you're in. If you want a hangout show, background comfort, or characters you can straightforwardly like, this is not that. People who quit Succession because everyone was awful will quit this by episode two for the same reason.

WORTH IT because the craft is doing the heavy lifting. The show has plenty on its mind, class envy, immigrant-family pressure, the specific loneliness of scrolling your phone at 2 a.m., but it never stops the story to explain any of it. Characters don't monologue their themes. They act them out badly and hurt people, which is how you know a writers' room trusts its material. Yeun and Wong are giving performances that would carry a weaker script, and the script isn't weaker. It's not perfect, the middle sags and the ambition occasionally outruns the episode count, but it's a real show trying real things rather than a streaming-algorithm product. That's rare enough to reward.