Netflix has dropped its new comedy-drama Beef today, Thursday, April 6, and creator and showrunner Lee Sung Jin has said that a real-life road rage experience inspired the series.
Beef centers on Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), who begin to torment each other after being involved in a road rage incident. These acts of revenge soon escalate, eventually consuming and destroying their lives as they knew them.
Speaking to Today.com, Jin described the moment that inspired the concept for the series. He said he had a “typical” interaction where a fellow driver was “honking, cursing… and then drove off.” But he didn’t let things end there as Jin decided to follow the other driver “for some reason.”
“I was like, ‘I’ll follow you.’ I justified it (as) ‘I’m commuting home and this person happens to be in front of me and if we go in different directions, I wouldn’t follow them.’ But we happened to be going the same direction home, for like miles and miles,” he said. “It was like 30 to 40 minutes. So I’m sure in his mind … it felt like I was just a wild lunatic stalking him.”
While the situation didn’t develop beyond that, Jin said it gave him the idea for Beef. “Here we are in our literal bubbles that you drive around in and very much trapped in our subjective realities,” he explained. “And so I thought that it’d be fun to explore.”
As for why Wong and Yeun’s characters react the way they do, Jin said, “I think for a lot of us when we’re stuck in our status quo, usually something dramatic has to happen to shake us out of it… Whether positive or negative.”
He continued, “I think that’s the case with Danny and Amy — they’re so entrenched in their ways that it took this road rage to shake them out of it, and I think it becomes a scapegoat for a lot of other things going on in their life.”
Beef, Now Streaming, Netflix
