Beef season two: Scathing Netflix comedy tackles the cult of aspiration with Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan

Aspiration is often framed as a positive and grasping as a negative. But the two concepts are essentially the same thing.

It’s all about desiring something you don’t have, something which you can see and which you think you should have.

Aspiration is what keeps capitalism going, the idea that you should always strive for more, growth at any cost - and everyone stays on the hamster wheel, jockeying for position, money and power.

But the system was always rigged, and those shiny examples of comfort and wealth are all but unattainable to most. Except no one wants to accept that, so we keep clawing and climbing even as the invisible forces of the status quo keep us down.

The new season of Beef is all about aspiration.

The Emmy-sweeping first season with Ali Wong and Steven Yeun started with a road rage incident and turned into an escalating feud between two strangers, but the themes coursing beneath the series was loneliness, despair and modern malaise.

This new instalment too is more than just a rivalry between its main characters. Creator Lee Sung Jin, who also wrote and directed most episodes, is always concerned about the personal and systemic factors that drive his characters’ actions.

Beef now functions as an anthology show, so we get an entirely new ensemble, led by Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny, with supporting performances from Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung, Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, William Fichtner and Seoyeon Jang.

Josh (Isaac) and Lindsay (Mulligan) had a great love affair but after more than a decade together, their marriage is at breaking point. Dreams of renovating their property into a bed-and-breakfast have long stalled, the unpainted walls and half-finished work a constant physical reminder of their failures.

Josh is the general manager of a ritzy country club in Montecito, the well-heeled ocean-side Californian community Harry and Meghan, Rob Lowe, Ariana Grande and Oprah Winfrey call home.

Josh is your guy. He can book you for a last minute golf game, sort out the aromatherapy in the sauna, comp your drinks and connect you with any other member. Lindsay does some interior design projects for the club and basically acts as something of a social lubricant with all the wives.

In return, Josh and Lindsay have access to some of the most powerful people and have ridden in private jets and partied with celebrities. Despite the cordiality and back-slapping, they’re not one of them. They are staff, and they’re paid like staff.

Ashley (Spaeny) and Austin (Melton) are even lower on the social pyramid, working at the club as a beverage cart attendant and casual all-rounder, barely clearing minimum wage and without health insurance. They live half an hour away in the working class town of Oxnard in a dinghy little flat, but they’re fawningly in love, and tell each other so all the time.

When Ashley and Austin catch Josh and Lindsay at their worst moment in a compromising position – and filmed it – they, especially Ashley, see an opportunity for advancement.

To Ashley, Josh is an old guy and an arsehole who has everything she’s been denied. She doesn’t get that he’s deep in a financial hole and is constantly treading water just to survive.

That’s the generational conflict Beef wants to explore, between that of Gen Z-ers and Millennials in the workplace (OK, technically Isaac is a Gen X-er, but, you know, he passes for someone younger).

While the Gen Z couple and the Millennial couple are fighting each other, the person lording it over all of them is actually Chairwoman Park (Youn), the billionaire new owner of the club.

It’s not explicit but she must run what the Koreans call a chaebol, a family-controlled business conglomerate that holds immense economic, political and social power in South Korea. There are few of them, which makes the concentration of wealth and influence even more appalling, and are often the target of criticism and protests from younger generations.

Chairwoman Park holds all the real cards, and the four core characters are increasingly drawn into her sphere through their own, generally bad, choices. They all think they can work the system – and Chairwoman Park - to their own end, and it’s a bitter lesson to discover that whatever advantage they may have gained, it’s illusory.

Beef mostly askews popular cliches about Gen Z-ers and Millennials, and uses the gen-on-gen conflict as more of a commentary on the inevitable cycle of idealism morphing into cynicism. We’re all doomed to repeat the actions of those we condemn.

But it’s not all sociological, philosophical and political polemics – though it certainly has a lot to say about the absolute rot that is the American healthcare system – because Beef is also incredibly entertaining and it’s very darkly, awkwardly funny.

When you have characters who are constantly on the move, it’s a momentum-heavy show, and there are a lot of thrills from watching the brilliantly cast Isaac, Mulligan, Spaeny and Melton plotting, eventually taking them on a wild adventure to Seoul.

The performances are great, the chemistry works wonderfully (this is Isaac and Mulligan’s third project together after Drive and Inside Llewyn Davis), and all those craft elements including a score by Finneas O’Connell are on form.

But it doesn’t quite hit the emotional poignancy of that first season. It does often feel like a show you really like but maybe not love. Whereas that first season was transcendent, it was beyond.

Beef is not a lay-back and chill experience, but it’s not meant to be. Anything that actually challenges the cult of aspiration never could be.

Beef is streaming on Netflix