Netflix has announced that season 2 of “Beef” is set to premiere on April 16.
The first season of Lee Sung Jin’s anthology series followed two characters, played by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, who are brought together by a road rage incident. Yeun and Wong will not reprise their roles but have remained with the show as executive producers.
Netflix Tudum released the following premise for the new season:
“A young couple witnesses 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.”
Asian American actor Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny will play the young couple, Variety reports. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan will play the boss and the boss’s wife.
In an interview with Deadline last November, Spaeny said the second season is “as batsh*t as the first one.”
“What’s fun about this one, is that it’s beef between couples and different generations,” she said.
Other Asian and Asian American cast members for season 2 include: Youn Yuh-jung (Minari, Pachinko, The Wedding Banquet), Song Kang-ho (Parasite, Broker, Memories of Murder) and Seoyeon Jang (Butterfly).
Registration is closed for Common Ground: Building Together conference and gala award banquet in San Francisco on January 24. A shoutout to our planning committee: Jane Chin, Frank Mah, Jeannie Young, Akemi Tamanaha, Nathan Soohoo, Mark Young, Dave Liu, and Yiming Fu.
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Once again, fully Asian actors are apparently not considered good enough to be the leads. Even after the first season proved successful on its own terms, the instinct remains to recalibrate—to make the leads half-white, more “palatable,” more acceptable to whatever bias Hollywood assumes its audience has.
I don’t care what the official reasoning is. At this point, it functions as cover for a racist bias. And the fact that the director and producers are Asian themselves doesn’t absolve it; if anything, it exposes a deeper problem. This is acquiescence—anticipating racism and accommodating it in hopes of personal or professional gain. That isn’t progress; it’s compliance.
What made the first season genuinely unusual was not just that it centered Asian characters, but that it featured an Asian male lead. That almost never happens. Hollywood’s default remains the same: Asian men are villains, jokes, or nerds, while Asian women are elevated as leads because the system deems them attractive and non-threatening. That isn’t empowerment—it’s another hierarchy.
So yes, representation is happening—but it’s still being carefully managed. Asian stories are allowed, success is acknowledged, but full representation is withheld. And when a unique breakthrough is followed by a retreat toward whiteness, it becomes clear this isn’t accidental. It’s a line the industry has decided not to cross.