Lee Sung Jin’s 10 episode Netflix series Beef, with its all Asian-American cast, feels like a revolution mainly because of its unique casting. This is not to diminish the work of anyone involved: Steven Yeun, who is the most consistently interesting actor working now in the United States, Ali Wong, David Choe in what feels like a breakout turn, Young Mazino bringing the sexy, Joseph Lee bringing the pop spirituality — the series is a showcase for tone-perfect performances paired with strong writing and direction. On the contrary, beyond any weaknesses in the plot, it has about it a compulsive energy. It plays with genre tropes lightly, traversing psychological thriller tropes heavy with sociological impact like Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), inner city gang and heist melodramas, and even existential freakouts like Bergman’s Persona (1966) or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) in a bizarre interlude in a rich person’s pleasure palace leading to a night of hallucinations and truth-telling. It’s a profound indictment of Hollywood wisdom that there isn’t enough Asian-American talent to populate a single motion picture, much less five hours of streaming content — and even if you could find the talent, that there wouldn’t be enough interest in the outcome to justify the effort. I think the popularity and awards-season triumphs of The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once is the first pinhole leak in that dam of entrenched, smug, systemic racism — and Beef, debuting at the top of new programs on Netflix, might be the next. What’s most exciting about both projects to me, however, is the extent to which seeing Asian-Americans cast in “normal” roles has been, in an almost ecclesiastical sense of the word, awesome to behold.

In Beef, Yeun plays struggling contractor Danny who, as the show opens, is trying to return a few hibachi grills he’s purchased with the intention of using them to kill himself. He’s out of money, the few clients he has think he’s irritating, and his life is playing out to him as a series of humiliations. As he’s leaving the store, he nearly hits a car driven by Amy (Wong), who responds by laying on the horn and throwing a bird out her window. Danny snaps, Amy snaps. Amy’s husband George (Lee), a trust-fund fine art nepo-baby specializing in sculpting poop-shaped ceramics that people admire without also purchasing, urges Amy to consider that Danny might be going through something that has caused him to escalate their interaction into a series of ugly retributive acts. His desire to demonstrate empathy is presented as a joke, but he’s not wrong. What he doesn’t see is Amy is going through a rough patch herself, wanting badly to sell her business to sociopathic billionaire Jordan (Maria Bello) so she might spend more time with their daughter June (June Nakai). It’s a lot, and a lot happens including Danny’s bad choices with his ex-con cousin Isaac (Choe) and Amy’s dalliance with Danny’s buff little brother Paul (Mazino), all of it culminating in a redemptive moment of connection when Danny’s and Amy’s meticulously-constructed strategies for assimilation and acceptance have been violently stripped away. With at least Amy in a fetal position, by the end of Beef they have both regressed into a natal state, free of the requirement to perform in a place unwilling to accept them for what they are in all of their florid fallibility and emotional wreckage.

It’s the assault on the myth of the model minority that stands at the heart of Beef, where even the outwardly-successful Amy is shown to be absolutely miserable. In the pressure of pretending to be the perfect mother, wife, business owner, and daughter-in-law to disapproving, stentorian Fumi (Patti Yasutake), she’s driven herself to road rage with Danny in the short-term, and a complete nervous breakdown in her foreseeable future. She gives a speech to a conference midway through the series where she tells an audience of fawning admirers how it’s possible for women to “have it all” in their lives and, knowing what we know, her words ring callow and disingenuous. If there’s a problem that I have with Beef it’s with its multiple scenes of cathartic exposition. A few of them are even set during therapy sessions during which Amy bulletpoints her trauma at what she perceives as her parents all-too-conditional love for her, and during which her obsequiousness to the process and ease with pop-psychological bromides present as well-practiced strategies of masquing behind unconditional surrender. If it were only the scene at the conference and Amy’s polished dishonesties… that’s powerful stuff. Having been through the ringer already with her extended confessionals, what might have been the climax of the piece is rendered decidedly anti-climactic. 

For Danny, his moment of cathartic release comes when he attends a Korean Evangelical church service in an act of desperation. The Korean Evangelical Church is a complex phenomena, tightly bound along racial and gendered lines, it offers Asian-American men one of the few places where it’s acceptable to demonstrate weakness, even despair. I think Danny’s weeping is the fulcrum of Beef, happening in the third episode of the show and carrying with it the tremendous weight of Danny’s disappointment with himself, his generational trauma at that point only hinted at, the possibility for his redemption already obvious and not in need of another seven installments to confirm both his wretchedness and his shot at a potential renaissance. 

But identifying the overarching narrative and thematic intentions of Beef is possibly reductive even as my desire to do the unpacking is indicative of a certain kind of progress. See, I’m not distracted by the representation of Asian-Americans in this show because everyone is Asian-American and all the bases are, as they say, covered. That’s ultimately the goal of representation: not to have the only example of a minority in a film that year be a stereotype, but rather to have enough representations of any minority in enough films to provide a picture of them as human. I would mind less if your Asian-American character was a master of kung fu if not every Asian-American character in everything I ever see is a master of kung-fu. In my experience with Asian-Americans (and it’s extensive), I’ve never actually met a kung-fu master. I have met, however, a lot of ordinary people with ordinary jobs, hopes, dreams, and depression, too, mental illness, dysfunction, suicide.

Every minority in this country has been branded with popularly-reinforced attributes — a few of them have proven to be not just insulting, but deadly. But Beef challenges Asian-American branding. Isaac is a good times guy and petty criminal who has had a role in Danny’s parents’ loss of their business; Danny has had a role in Paul’s failure to launch; George has committed an emotional infidelity and Amy subsequently commits a physical one. There are ignoble jealousies and intemperate acts committed between members of the church, the HOA, Amy’s business associates, and the band of hoodlums assembled by Isaac to hang out smoking weed. When Danny plays the guitar for his new friends for the first time, he doesn’t sing some ancient folk song from a country he’s probably never been to, he sings Calabasas, California’s own Incubus’ chart-topping anthem of self-discovery “Drive.” And, vitally, he sings it perfectly, too. No William Hung, he.

The ultimate importance of Beef isn’t in the playing out of this series of bad behaviors and unfortunate events (the closest analogue to which in my mind is Danny DeVito’s pitch black The War of the Roses), but that Asian-Americans have been asked to enact humanity at its bleakest, most desperate and grasping state, without a white baseline for comparison and contrast. It’s important for Asian-Americans, too, to begin to see their humanity reflected back at them by their own, absolutely and stridently American, community. The only out for an Asian-American man contemplating self-harm can’t be ritual suicide, kneeling on a straw mat in the middle of a medieval courtyard. The only remedy for shame can’t be cutting off a finger for your Yakuza boss. You won’t kill your parents with shame if you cry in front of someone.

The details of Beef are where it resonates the loudest. The subtleties of inter-Asian racism (George is Japanese, Isaac is persecuted in prison by “the Filipinos”) are touched upon, the resistance to miscegenation, the toxicity of masculinity in a closed and persecuted group. As the United States becomes more divisive and welcoming of fascist authoritarian violence with Asian-Americans targeted often, Beef can be read for profit as a reaction to that constant fear of capricious persecution. Our nerves are raw. We are a powderkeg. It’s no accident, I think, that the first episode of the show (“The Birds Don’t Sing, They Cry In Pain”) is named after an infamous Werner Herzog quote describing his view of nature as not an Eden, but as some kind of Darwinistic hell in which the natural state is pain unto death. America is hell and we’re all in here together. The importance of Beef is that it trusts its audience to identify Asian-Americans as human beings without the help of a “grounding” filter to make it more “relatable.” Positive representation doesn’t mean positive characters — it should mean three-dimensional characters. Being afraid all of the time and feeling hunted in a place that despises you is relatable. Even model minorities experience it.

Instantly one of the most examined and written-about pieces of 2023, compare the coverage for Beef to the initial relatively sparse coverage for Everything Everywhere All At Once to find outlets wanting perhaps to get ahead of the next big thing in a particular cultural moment this time around. Much like my own careful avoidance throughout the first half of my life avoiding hanging out with other Asians, one of us could be an innocuous novelty escaping much disapprobation but two is a potentially threatening trend. Crazy Rich Asians made a lot of money, but rocked no boats as a shoddy bit of easily-dismissable pro-capital garbage that promised only to open new revenue streams for the status quo. But with Everything Everywhere All At Once, Asian-Americans are suddenly a force, not simply an audience hungry to see itself reflected, possessing the creative chops to challenge the traditional, monocultural masters of the universe. Expect the serious backlash already in progress, and hopefully also the opportunity for projects like Beef to continue to push the door open.

It’s good news, in other words, but good news that comes with cautionary historical precedent. I’m thinking of the Blaxploitation movement of the 1970s that opened with Melvin Van Peebles bombastic, take-no-prisoners Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), successful enough to launch an entire genre of Black-centered films that were almost instantly colonized by white people making creative decisions and banking the goodwill of an audience similarly hungry for representation. The fire of revolution burned bright, in other words, but briefly before the status quo reasserted itself in pursuit of the mighty dollar. We’re early yet in this particular battle, but the cultural war has been raging for generations and whatever gains we’ve won in the past, we’ve given back again and more. For now, though, there’s hope in, of all places, this rough show about people whose lives have been transformed by terror and rage. What could be more American?

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.