Beef Season 2: 26 Thoughts I Had About the Sets While Binging the Show
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Three years ago, I became enamored with Beef , the critically acclaimed Netflix series created by Lee Sung Jin, in which a trivial confrontation between two strangers spirals into an all-consuming, destructive rivalry. I particularly admired how set design served as a visual representation of the stark disconnect between the two foes played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, highlighting their inner demons behind closed doors and illustrating themes of class disparity, racial dynamics, and existential loneliness.
As soon as it concluded, I began counting down the days until the next installment, and come April 16, Beef season 2 finally arrived. This time around, there’s an all-new cast of characters, but design once again magnifies the disconnect between the central players in a rivalry. A Gen Z couple—Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton)—work as lower-level staff at an elite country club, Monte Vista Point. When they visit their General Manager Josh Martin’s (Oscar Isaac) home and witness a violent altercation between him and his interior designer wife, Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan), it sets off a wild chain of events, starting with their plot to blackmail him.
When the club’s new owner, a billionaire from Korea named Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), discovers Josh has been siphoning money, both couples become entangled in her scheme to conceal her own scandal by luring club members into cosmetic surgery trips to her husband’s clinic in Korea.
All the way through, the sets of Beef season 2—from the country club’s make-believe world and the homes of its staff, to the plastic surgery clinic in Korea—open a conversation around class mobility and power.
As I binged the show, I once again noticed tons of symbolic clues embedded within the sets. Below, follow along with every thought I had as I watched the chaos unfold. And beware of spoilers!
1.In the opening scene, kids are frolicking through fake snow with polar bears, pastel flowers, beach waves, pumpkins, and haystacks. I have no sense of time or place—how are all four seasons happening at once here?
2.It’s all contained on a perfectly manicured green lawn. What kind of fake world is this?
3.Okay, we are in fact in the real world—of extremely rich people at a country club. The building is giving Spanish Colonial Revival with its stucco façade, red accents, arched arcades, and bell tower.
4.I expected Josh and Lindsay’s home to look like the club, given how much they seem to fit in there, but it’s so heavy and dark. The main thing that stands out is the alcohol—bars in multiple rooms, bottles everywhere.
5.“We’ve been here for six years, and nothing is finished,” says Lindsay. I can definitely tell. It doesn’t take that long to plant an herb garden. Everything is so dimly lit that I can barely see what the piles of clutter sitting around are. This place has potential, but it’s kind of miserable.
6.Josh is clearly living a completely separate life in this backhouse of his, as evidenced by the framed photos, golf clubs, a fully stocked kitchen, and clothes.
7.Okay, Lindsay was playing the role of country-club wife really well initially, but she clearly hates his job and that he is staff…as evidenced by the way she’s smashing his precious country-club memorabilia to bits here.
8.When Ashley and Austin arrive, they’re talking about how sickeningly rich the neighborhood looks until they see the fight. This peek through the window is doing a lot of heavy symbolic lifting.
9.The club interiors—designed by Lindsay—include floor-to-ceiling pastels and florals. There’s robin’s egg blue wallpaper, pink tassels, floral curtains, and flowers everywhere. Though the walls are covered in branches that seem like an extension of the greenery outside the windows, it feels very stuffy. And very forgettable.
10.I’m shocked that Ashley and Austin’s home is basically the same exact color palette as the country club parlor. I’m not sure what this means yet, but it feels as derivative as everything else in their lives, like Austin blatantly copying a fitness influencer when he films his workout tutorials.
11.The only thing in their home that really stands out is Austin’s football trophy, which he keeps staring at while he figures out what to do with his life.
12.Everything at the club is green—the tower, the carts, the uniforms, the equipment—while Josh tries bribing Ashley with hush money. Symbolism!!!
13.Josh calls Monte Vista Point, “A place where club members can pretend everything is okay.” The club really is just a land of make believe.
14.Ashley’s new office is so stuffy and depressing compared to the outdoor parts of the club we see the members enjoying. It’s brown and teeming with stacks of papers.
15.Josh’s office looks identical. I wonder why there are so many clocks ticking on his wall though. Are his days numbered?
16.These shelves and shelves of pillows in Lindsay’s design studio all look the same. Her dog, Burberry, even matches them, like a piece of decor. From the country club parlor to her home, she leaves a frilly pastel touch wherever she goes. She seems to be decorating for a tea party.
17.I love when she fills the club parlor with “cheaply made-in-China fire-hazard” pillows, wearing a matching Chinese porcelain-print suit, as she proudly announces to the Chairwoman that she selected all the china too. Funny that Josh panics and corrects her with “dishware,” as if china were an offensive term (to a Korean!).
18.While there’s nothing outwardly offensive about the design of the parlor, Chairwoman Park (dressed in head to toe black) clearly isn’t a fan of the pastels and frills. When she calls the design “colonial” after examining each pillow and tossing them aside, I can’t believe Lindsay thinks it’s a compliment! Until Chairwoman’s assistant interjects her smile and says that she hates “colonial” and will have to redo everything.
19.Clean lines, low furniture, neutral palette, glass, wood, stone—a glimpse into Chairwoman Park’s home seems to show how the country club will likely soon look. Personally, I can’t really visualize the club members in this space, but it’s definitely more memorable than the club’s aesthetic. It even feels more airy and zen with its floor to ceiling windows and vast outdoor spaces. It makes the club feel very cooped up in comparison.
20.The plastic surgery clinic in Korea, Trochos, is so sterile and looks eerily like a dystopian version of the Chairwoman’s home.
21.When Josh and Lindsay touch hands through the translucent walls of their treatment rooms, it echoes earlier in the season, when we could see them cheating on each other through windows into different rooms of their home. But now that they actually wish they could see each other, it’s too late.
22.Josh’s prison cell looks as monochrome and uniform as both the club and Trochos.
23.As Lindsay sits on her toilet watching Josh’s prison release on TV, the calico-esque, ditzy-floral shower curtain reminds me of the “colonial” style of the club she designed. And the Toile de Jouy wallpaper behind her seems to evoke an aristocratic fantasy. It’s almost like her whole home is a reconstruction of the club.
24.The set is suddenly giving me déjà vu. Kids are playing at the same festival again, until the camera pans to the new GM: Ashley. Are we returning to the beginning? After all this chaos, life at the country club is still the same?
25.When it cuts to Park laying on her husband’s tombstone, this is the most beautiful cemetery I’ve ever seen.
26.As she talks about the passage of time and love, the cemetery starts spinning, the grass becoming tennis courts, and suddenly, it looks like a giant clock in the lawn of the club, split into four seasons, as if through all this chaos time is still frozen at Monte Vista.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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