'Beef' is the best original show on Netflix in years

Let's not kid ourselves - Netflix has a tendency to crank out a lot of crap that few people watch and even less find enjoyable.

Even when it's a good series, they still manage to leaden them down with filler episodes that are just entirely unnecessary. There's even a technical term for it - Netflix bloat - that underlines how much of a problem it is. Yet, as the streaming services have increased in number, so to has Netflix's issues with quality control. Is a fourth season of 'You' really necessary? How many other shows have been sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic success? Where's the third season of 'Mindhunter', for example?

'Beef' is a rarity for Netflix. It's objectively good, it's able to get through ten episodes without running into issues with pacing, and it doesn't feel like it was a movie hacked into ten episodes to satisfy some arbitrary parameters for what Netflix thinks will work. The whole story kicks off when Steven Yuen, playing a down-on-his-luck contractor, gets into a road-rage incident with Ali Wong, who plays a successful but exhausted retail entrepreneur. The two get into a high-speed chase across Los Angeles, evidence of which is caught on Ring cameras and social media, but never identifies either of them initially. Determined to settle the score, Yuen's character tracks down Wong to her family home, believing it to be her husband behind the wheel during the inciting incident. From there, it's a tit-for-tat, or "tit-for-shit" as one character calls it, with both of them going to further and darker tendencies to get one over on the other.

There are laugh-out-loud moments aplenty in 'Beef', all of them built around the petty battle of wits between Yuen and Wong. The musical choices throughout are fascinating - pulled from elder millennial playlists, with hits like Incubus' 'Drive' and the Smashing Pumpkins mixed in with other classics - and the direction from Jake Scheirer and Hikari is lucid and appealing, aware of the talent it has and using it to its full effect.

Ali Wong's standup comedy has previously dealt with a number of issues and themes that occur in 'Beef', be it Asian-American stereotypes, the vacuity of millennial consumerism, class and social tension, sexuality, whatever - but here, it's distilled into two characters. That's what makes 'Beef' so interesting, that in another existence, both Ali Wong and Steven Yuen's characters might have been friends, or possibly even lovers. The show has flickers of this, where their bottled-up rage is so unique and connective between them, but is aimed at one another. Yuen, for his part, is able to perfectly portray a particular kind of seething borne out of the kind of desperation that feels so acute in the US, particularly in Los Angeles. Likewise, Wong has that wellness industry veneer, all Pinterest-friendly hats and glasses, but with a deep chasm of emptiness underneath it all.

So much of Netflix's output in the last few years has been either new seasons of old shows, or new shows cranked out to fill up the library and keep audiences glued in rather than looking abroad. 'Beef' has a real personality to it, and like 'The Bear' - which it will no doubt be confused with, but has little to nothing in common with - it feels handmade, not algorithmically generated. It feels so unlike a Netflix show - fresh, original, offbeat - yet it's easily the best original show they've had in years.