I’m late to a lot of parties–assuming I get invited to them at all. When I did my usual overnight research for last week’s musing on A24, I paid particular note to the premium placement BEEF had on its humble brag list–not to mention the fact that a highly anticipated new season after a significant delay was about to drop on a major streamer. I had somehow missed its first season when it debuted on Netflix three years ago, and that’s my bad. Turns out S2 was being deployed by Netflix in a similar manner to how EUPHORIA was on HBO/MAX. When I found DEADLINE’s gushy story about its Season Two premiere that took both Dessi Gomez and Glenn Garner I was all the more intrigued:
Season 1 starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two strangers whose lives collide in a strange way after they’re involved in a traffic incident of their own. The debut season was a critical success, earning four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, and three Golden Globes, including Best Limited or Anthology Series or Television Film.
I binge-watched the first season and I was generally impressed. I was also taken by the vision of its co-creator, Korean-American director Lee Sung Jin–at least how Wikipedia revealed it to me:
Jin has planned the show to last three seasons: “There are a lot of ideas on my end to keep this story going. I think should we be blessed with a Season Two, there’s a lot of ways for Danny and Amy to continue. I have one really big general idea that I can’t really say yet, but I have three seasons mapped out in my head currently.”[22].
Well, that vision turned out to be akin to what my old bathroom confidente Ryan Murphy had already utilized–use an overarching theme of a feud as a backdrop for an anthology series where each season has little connectivity with the other. Indeed, there’s no Danny nor Amy to be found. We instead get a whole new troupe, as DEADLINE’s dynamic duo confirmed:
Season 2 of Beef follows a young couple (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny) as they witness an alarming fight between their boss and his wife, triggering chess moves of favors and coercion in the elitist world of a country club and its Korean billionaire owner.
USA TODAY’s Kelly Lawler zoomed in with her personal GPS:
The Season 2 cast is led by household names Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, playing a deeply unhappy husband and wife whose semi-violent fight sets off the series of wild events of the season…we meet Josh (Isaac), the general manager of a ritzy LA country club who desperately wants the power, money and prestige of the rich clients he serves drinks to every night. He’s married to Lindsay (Mulligan), an interior decorator who resents her husband for squandering their dreams of opening a bed and breakfast. At home after a fundraiser one night at the club, the couple gets into an argument over finances, their dreams, their sex life, and seemingly every problem they’ve ever had. It starts to turn violent, with broken glasses and Josh grabbing a golf club to seemingly strike Lindsay. That’s when they notice they’re being watched.
It took FX and Murphy six years to follow up the modestly successful first season of the spot-on-named FEUD–which focused around Bette Davis and Joan Crawford–with a far less satisfying sequel involving Truman Capote and the Swans. The subject matter and the performances were simply not up to par with the high bar that its first season set, and the much less favorable numbers both viewership and awards-wise reflected it. We’re already seeing BEEF’s sophomore effort received in a similar fate, as FORBES’ culture champion Paul Tassi shared last Friday:
You would think that the second season of a multi-Emmy-winning series starring some of the most popular actors in the field would gain a lot of traction when it arrives. But for Beef season 2? Something has gone very wrong, it seems. A show will not appear on Netflix’s top 10 list the day it arrives, but the list resets a day later, and that’s where you can see where it lands. Well, today, Beef is at the #10 spot, barely making the list at all…I really don’t know what’s going on here. Granted, Beef may not have needed another season, but turning it into an anthology with the original showrunner and a cast this good should be attracting more viewers.
That may explain in part why it was off my radar, and FWIW my experience fell in line with what the early returns have showed. It’s adequate, to be sure, but Isaac and Mulligan to me come off more shrill and predictable than did Yeun and Wong. I’ve not yet completed S2, and I’ll confess I’m not necessarily giddy to do so. But according to what Lee confided via PEOPLE’s Christopher Hartman, he’s not exactly losing sleep over it:
At the season 2 premiere of Beef in April 2026, the creator said in an interview that he was “perfectly happy with this being the last season.”
Not the best of news for Netflix, especially in a week where they got a more sobering dose of it from the community they seek validation from first and foremost, as PRIME TIMER’s Srishti Chourasia also noted on Friday:
Shares of Netflix tumbled by about 9% in after-hours trading, following its latest earnings report and the news that co-founder Reed Hastings will be stepping down from the board, as reported by Reuters. At the same time, the company provided solid first-quarter results that beat expectations on top and bottom line, but investor sentiment soured after uncertainty surrounding leadership changes. The market response is typical: even a good current quarter can be dwarfed by concerns about growth going forward. Netflix affirmed its full-year guidance with no upward revision, signaling a more cautious path ahead. Alongside Hastings’ departure as an active leader, it raised concerns among investors about what the company’s next growth phase might look like.
To me, that seems to be a more plausible explanation for that reaction than the dot-connecting that a number of observers–including a few of our more ardent fans–seemed to infer. I tend to fall more in line with how FAST COMPANY’s
In an analyst call, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Netflix’s co-CEOs, were asked whether Hastings’s preference to build, not buy, was a factor in his departure after Netflix decided to go ahead and pursue a WBD acquisition anyway. But according to Peters, Hastings’s decision to leave the company had nothing to do with the move. “Sorry if anyone who is looking for some palace [intrigue] here,” Peters said, according to a PitchBook transcript, “[but] not so.”
He added: “Reed was a big champion for that deal. He championed it with the Board. The Board unanimously supported the deal. So we had perfect alignment with management and the Board on the Warner Bros. deal. So it absolutely had nothing to do with it.” Sarandos also chimed in, acknowledging that “It’s very unusual for a founder to step away from the board of the company after succession,” but adding that “Reed is no ordinary founder.”
Founders build from nothing, and Netflix has indeed entrenched itself as best-in-class among streaming services when it comes to audience size and subscription revenue. But it now competes with two much more daunting behemoths–the omnipresence and equally formidable financial resources of YouTube, and indeed its own legacy. To its credit, Netflix has pivoted from its initial vision and embraced the likes of live sports and podcasts–they’ve achieved strong results with NFL Christmas day programming, for example, and recently launched a series of titles from the likes of The Ringer and other Spotify brands. But last Thursday NBC SPORTS’ resident yenta Mike Florio was among those who surreptiously revealed that the empire has struck back:
Antitrust, shmantitrust…Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports reports that YouTube and the NFL have “entered a long-form contract review” for the slate of games. This means they’ve reached a consensus as to the major terms, and that they’re hammering out the precise language of the contract…The options were believed to include the Week 1 49ers-Rams game in Australia, a Thanksgiving eve game (which is not official but apparently inevitable), a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.