“There's always fucking something,” the handyman, played by Steven Yeun, is saying to himself, sitting behind the wheel of his weathered pick-up truck. It's one of those days where the petty gods are all morbid in their humour: the queue at the home improvement store had been long, the cashier was feeling unsympathetic and Danny Cho was just trying to return three hibachi grills he had been planning to use to kill himself, only he couldn't produce the necessary receipts. Now he's stuck with the souvenirs of his depression, and with himself, and whatever omen one can reasonably extract from this hand of cards. His luck is foul and baking in the LA sun. Even his seatbelt is giving him a hard time.
The compounding losses play across his face: a flash of stifled anger, a weak attempt at self-soothing and something like resignation. Staccato blinking, a gnaw at the bottom lip and a slow exhale. Every day has its parade of tragicomic inconveniences, and if you're of a certain social experience, if you look a certain way, most of these tallies are destined to remain unsettled. There are some people for whom public displays of anger are warranted but socially denied. Still, the body keeps score and Danny is at the end of his rope. When someone pulls their sparkling Mercedes SUV in behind him just as he's backing out of his parking spot, slams on their horn for a brief eternity and then thrusts a middle finger out of their window his despair kindles into fury. He takes off down the road behind them and peels madly through the suburbs, ruining flower beds, narrowly skirting accidents and memorising the number plate as they escape. It's like an inverted meet-cute: the pair are suddenly, catastrophically, bonded by their uncorked rage, and alive to the fact that neither has anywhere else to put it. The next nine episodes of Beef chronicle the destruction they sow in each other's lives, and in their own.
In person, Yeun is calmer, more polite and surprised that anyone would take an aeroplane ride to LA to speak to him of all people, even though he's one of the finest actors of his generation. We're seated across from each
