Happy Tax Week, everyone! I hope that you, like I, realized that DOGE gutted the IRS to such an extent that you’ll never get audited and thus didn’t file at all. If enough people do it, we’re protected. They can’t prosecute all of us! Anyway, while you nervously wait for the distinct rap of the taxman’s knuckles on your front door, you may want something to watch. Which is why my weekly recommendations column exists: to guide you toward what might distract you from all of our impending doom. 

Beef, season two (Netflix) 

How do you follow up an awards-bedecked phenomenon that was packaged as a standalone mini-series? Well, you could hire Meryl Streep and Andrea Arnold and hope for the best, or you could just come up with a new story entirely. Which is just what creator Lee Sung Jin has done with his anthology about class rage in modern California. There is some sophomore bumpiness here, and some erratically outsized second-attempt ambition, but this round of Beef is, for the most part, another engaging trip into chaos. 

Lee has upped the star quotient for season two, enlisting Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny to populate a story of country club war. Isaac and Mulligan play the husband and wife duo who run the place—or, rather, he does; she just does some of the interior design. Mulligan’s character has spent her inheritance propping up Isaac’s career dreams, and no small amount of resentment has built up between them. Meanwhile, Melton and Spaeny are guileless dopes who work at the club and suddenly find themselves with a risky opportunity to exploit their way into career advancement. 

The season, of course, spins off from there. It maybe never reaches the operatically grim heights of Maria Bello being cut in half by a panic room door (sorry for the season one spoiler), but it does go to some pleasingly strange places—and it goes to Seoul! Minari Oscar winner Yuh-Jung Youn shows up eventually as the steely head of a shadowy Korean conglomerate (much as she did in The Wedding Banquet last year) and adds a welcome dash of wit and danger. 

Sometimes it feels like Lee is trying to gather too much into his portrait of greed, careerism, need, and fate. But that abundance is also part of the excitement, I suppose. That said, I would be very curious to see what Lee might do with a feature film, whether he could successfully condense the many ideas and motifs he wants to explore into a tighter narrative. Or, maybe he’s best in this mode. 

He certainly gets strong work out of his actors. Isaac reminds us of the wily energy that Frankenstein (and the Star Wars movies) either misused or subdued. Mulligan finds the empathetic dimensions of her brittle, bitter character. Melton proves that May December was not a fluke, playing dumb in a smart, sensitive way. Spaeny has perhaps the most complicated moral shading to maneuver; her character is often pitiable and loathsome in the same scene, a striver who gets a bit too high on the heady air in which she suddenly finds herself. Spaeny gamely commits to playing the full facets of a person, rather than just her obvious narrative traits. 

Even if I rolled my eyes at a few oddball plot developments, I kept happily forging ahead, episode after episode. I finished the whole season in one itchy-eyed day, eager to see where and how Lee would land his tricked-out plane. He arrives somewhere strangely poignant—though, in hindsight, I think that poignance may be a little forced, or requires too much ignoring of what’s come before it. Still, I was… poigned. Because it does indeed feel like the end of a long and wild journey, and because it involves a pretty song and a simple sentiment about what is truly important in life. The great trick of both seasons of Beef is to indulge our rage about money and to offer it some catharsis too, some reassurance that not every bit of our happiness is predicated on financial assets. That may be something of a comforting delusion, but it comforts nonetheless.