Beef bulk order

I have a simple test when it comes to good television: Did it make me put my phone down?

I partake in what’s known as ambient TV, where there’s something on while I’m folding laundry or cleaning up my living room or on my phone, texting friends or tweeting to non-friends. The less interested I am in a show, the more texts get sent, the crisper the folds are, and the cleaner my coffee table is. To get me to forget my phone, my T-shirts, and my dirty coffee table, a show has to knock me out.

And right now the show doing that is Netflix and A24’s anxiety-inducing Beef.

My only texts to friends were in the brief seconds between each episode.

“Did you start Beef?”

“I like that this is obliquely a show about hot Asians hotting hottily”

“Ali Wong is doing fantastic stuff. Is this about her divorce? I think it’s about her divorce.”

Beef creates commanding television by twisting the idea of a fateful encounter. Usually, when humans talk about chance meetings with other humans, we think of the positive. Like there’s a one in 8 billion chance of meeting your soulmate, or it’s some kind of lucky coincidence that a stranger may change your life for the better. People come into your life for a reason, we’re told (often by people who have seemingly come into our lives to dispense this saccharine view of the world).

Beef proposes the frightening scenario in which a once-in-a-lifetime moment could result in finding your mortal enemy, and the terrifying possibility that someone we’ve never met before could change our lives for the worse.

Like all good tragedies, Beef begins in a home improvement store called Forster’s. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), who dreams of making enough money to bring his hard-working parents back from Korea and letting them retire, is faced with the grim reality of trying to return multiple hibachi grills without a receipt. Anyone who has ever tried knows that returning an item without a receipt is an impossible, Sisyphean task, an endless loop of questions and answers designed to break a person’s soul.