Review: Steven Yeun, Ali Wong sink their teeth into simmering 'Beef'

A road rage incident significantly alters the lives of two drivers and also the lives of those around them in "Beef," an often funny, often poignant look at modern life and the tightrope we're all walking on and how easy it is to lose one's sense of balance and freefall into the depths below.

Creator Lee Sung Jin deftly balances comedy, drama and tension as he digs deep into the lives of his two main characters, played by Troy-raised Academy Award-nominee Steven Yeun and "Always Be My Maybe's" Ali Wong. He mines his characters' Asian American cultural identities for specifics and also universal truths, telling a fresh, contemporary tale of the haves and have-nots, family, right and wrong, depression, anxiety, success and the American dream.

The 10-episode Netflix series opens with Danny (Yeun), a down-on-his-luck general contractor who is experiencing a particular low in the parking lot of a big box hardware store, nearly backing into another driver. They lay heavy on their horn for a bit longer than is needed. It's a common incident across all manner of parking lots every day, we've all been there, and it usually ends with a few muttered curse words and perhaps a sigh of relief that nothing worse happened. But when Danny finds himself on the receiving end of a flipped bird, he's off to the races.

Triggered — and fed up, not just with this incident but with every single thing in his life — he goes after the driver, following them out of the parking lot and stepping on the gas. Red lights are run, flower beds are driven across and torn up. Neither driver gives an inch and the chase goes on for miles. After they're both turned around and the white SUV he's following nearly backs into him at full speed, Danny catches the license plate and commits it to memory. He's not letting this one go.

Turns out the other driver is Amy (Wong), who's in the process of selling the small business she owns for a cool $10 million. She lives in a lavish home with her husband, George (Joseph Lee), and their young daughter. Her life is seemingly idyllic.

Danny, who lives in a cramped apartment with his doofy, horndog brother Paul (Young Mazino), knows little of this when he vows revenge, tracking her down and talking his way into her front door to discuss home repairs. Excusing himself to her restroom, he urinates all over — all over — her carpeted bathroom and scurries away. To him, that's the end of it, book closed. But it turns out it's only the beginning of the way these two circle each other's lives and drag each other into various levels of hell.

Jin ("2 Broke Girls," FX's "Dave") takes a premise that could quickly exhaust itself and keeps turning the screw, digging deeper and deeper into the lives of his characters, and giving his supporting characters room to breathe and inhabit their own storylines. (He also gets a lot of mileage out of episode-closing alt-rock needle drops.) Artist David Choe plays Danny's ex-con cousin Isaac, who takes advantage of Danny and pulls him into criminal doings; Patti Yasutake plays Fumi, Amy's overbearing mother-in-law; and Maria Bello plays Jordan, Amy's billionaire boss. Everyone gets a seat at the table.

"Beef" takes off from a similar place as 2020's "Unhinged" or even the 1993 Michael Douglas thriller "Falling Down" but quickly expands beyond those single-note stories with its focus on the worlds of its characters. No one is an innocent here, and Jin lets his characters' faults and bad traits drive their lousy decisions. And he lets them live with those decisions and experience the consequences. He's not interested in putting anyone on a pedestal.

Yeun and Wong are both excellent, meeting the material and consistently finding new wrinkles, new layers, in their characters. They're flawed, they're trying to live up to the expectations of themselves, of their parents, of society. They're human. "Beef" is a cautionary tale, but it's ultimately, maybe, a hopeful one. Deep down, you likely have more in common with that person who cut you off in the parking lot than you think you do.

'Beef'

GRADE: A-

Rated TV-MA: for language, violence and sexual situations

On Netflix

agraham@detroitnews.com

@grahamorama