The first season of BEEF — Lee Sung Jin’s 2023 episodic ode to road rage and all the ways modern life induces immense stress — took the world by storm, winning eight Emmys and three Golden Globes. For a follow-up installment of the anthology, Lee wanted to use the show’s foundation — the exploration of anger in its most dramatic and comic forms — as a jumping-off point for something familiar but also wholly unique, bringing us along for the ride through a new rabbit hole of wrath and resentment. “The intention with BEEF was always to have it as an anthology — even in the original pitch, we said we’d love to explore other types of beefs,” he says. “And I think given that Season 1’s beef was so in-your-face, we wanted to change the feeling where it's a little bit more passive-aggressive, more of the internal repression, of the kind of rage that you see in the workplace.”

With an entirely new blockbuster cast of Oscar winners and nominees, the story is something of a battle between generations, with a plot as intricately put together as a Swiss watch: working behind the scenes at an ultra-exclusive country club in the Southern California, young couple Ashley (Cailee Spaeny, Wake Up Dead Man) and Austin (Charles Melton, May December) — two employees with little power and even less job security — find themselves pulled into the private collapse of their bosses: the club’s tightly wound general manager, Josh (Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein), and his volatile wife, the club’s interior designer Lindsay (Carey Mulligan, Maestro). Ashley and Austin are quietly pressured into running favors, keeping secrets, and choosing sides, all in hopes of securing protection from the club’s untouchable senior owner, the enigmatic billionaire Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung, Minari). But Park is fighting fires of her own, as a brewing scandal tied to her second husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho, Parasite), threatens to expose just how fragile the club’s polished hierarchy really is. 

To create a wholly fresh world distinct from Season 1, returning production designer Grace Yun came up with an overarching approach to visualizing the show: the storylines, as she puts it, are fascinatingly split between the generations, with plots that focus on Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers; Yun decided to give each age group a corresponding seasonal feel when it comes to the aesthetic of their personal spaces. “Ashley and Austin are just starting a new life together, so we're assigning the season of spring to them. More pastels and softer colors, this feeling of freshness and hopefulness,” she says. For Josh and Lindsay, who are struggling through the midpoint of life, a rugged autumnal earthiness felt right, with unfinished walls, Coachella paraphernalia, and loose electrical outlets in their abode. “Their home is a representation of their dreams. When they first purchased it, they wanted to create a bespoke bed and breakfast, but when we see it, it's still mid-renovation — and it’s stuck in that renovation,” Yun says. “There’s that sense of compounding stressors, of an unfinished dream, an unrealized dream.”

In Park and Kim’s icy cold world of wealth in Korea, Yun used a gray-and-white palette of quiet luxury and restrained, moneyed minimalism. “The wealth and the power are displayed by the absence of things. It’s more embedded in the architecture rather than the decor, which is something far more costly than just buying a ton of different lamps,” she says. “It’s in the texture of the walls and in the flow of the spaces.” Then there’s the all-important country club, the nucleus around which all the characters orbit, which subtly evolves as Park takes more and more control away from Josh and Lindsay. “In a lot of films and TV, country clubs often have a ‘boys club’ feel, a lot of dark wood and 1980s-feeling ornamentation. But with Grace, there's a lot of yellows and different wallpapers,” Lee says of Yun’s work. “It’s just fun to collaborate with a production designer who is taking what’s on the page not just literally, but adding to it.” 

The Oscar-nominated cinematographer James Laxton — whom Lee loved for his work on groundbreaking films like Moonlight — joins the BEEF team for the sophomore outing. He wanted to represent the hectic, unpredictability with a sense of unfilteredness. “I think the show needs a very natural sort of portrayal. The way Sonny's writing functions best is when the visual is more authentically portrayed. It's a bit more reserved,” he says. Laxton used a new-generation 65 mm camera called the Alexa 265 to capture high quality large format images. “There's just so many frames of this season that could be paintings,” says Lee.  In the often tight, cramped world of the show, where the magic of editing and cinematography can bring us right into the intense, claustrophobic mind of the characters. “Some of the more frightening scenes are in Episode 4 at the hospital. I wouldn’t categorize it as horror, but maybe a tense thriller-ness to it all,” Laxton says. “There are some sort of physical blocking moments within that episode that are interesting — where characters can be revealed behind characters, with a tone that both strikes a scare and a laugh. One of the things I love most about the show’s visual language is that it can go between those two things very effortlessly — a scene can feel unnerving, but at the same time humorous.” 

Music plays a huge role in the world of BEEF. For the score, Lee turned to composer and musician Finneas O’Connell, best known for his long-running collaboration with his sister, Billie Eilish; Lee knew he wanted to tap into the producer and artist’s signature sound the moment he heard his Oscar-winning song, “What Was I Made For?,” from Barbie. “I wanted the score to feel polished, to tug at the heartstrings, because the season is about love at the end of the day,” says Lee. “Finneas has that gift that so many of the greats do — they take these familiar chord progressions, and they always know exactly when and how to subvert it a little bit, but not too much where it takes you left field.” O’Connell already counted himself a fan of BEEF Season 1 when he first met with Lee, and early conversations with the creator about the characters and country club setting of Season 2 got the gears turning for his possible approach. “I went and found a sprinkler running in Griffith Park, and I recorded that. I took that file of the sprinkler, ran it through a sort of a quantizer engine to make it, like in common time, and then built all these beats around a sprinkler head, which I found very like stressful and anxiety-inducing, even though it's like this kind of a pleasant sound,” says O’Connell. “If you’re on a golf course and you hear a sprinkler, it’s like, oh, it’s kind of nice, but try to make this kind of stressful environment out of that.” The early demo spoke to Lee and the season’s thematic tension, and the Grammy winner was officially on board for the sonic challenge. “This is super different to anything I've done before,” says O’Connell. “I could do another eight episodes right now, but to get to episode eight was this cutting through the woods. It's not following a map. [It was] super satisfying.”

When it came to costumes, it was important that the wardrobe — as well as the hair and makeup — felt close to real life. But, just like with the decor of the homes, it represented the split in generation between characters, contrasting, for example, the poppy influencer-y athleisure of Austin with the business casual blandness of Josh. “I thought it was really interesting to try to decode a generation aesthetically. Normally we can look at a trend or a generation 20 years back, but trying to define it and mimic it in real time was really interesting. A lot of these characters would have a social media presence, so it’s spending a lot of time on Instagram, finding people that fit the same socioeconomic profile, living in the same place,” says costume designer Olga Mill (Love Lies Bleeding) of her research process. “I listened to a few lectures about the differences between Millennial and Gen Z, and the word authenticity kept coming up. The millennial tendency to have a perfect morning routine and clean girl aesthetic, everything is artisan and handcrafted. While Gen Z pulls towards a messier rejection of perfection.”

As with BEEF Season 1, Lee finds that the real alchemy never comes from a single voice — it emerges in the friction, trust, and shared risk of a full creative team shaping the story together. “The true signature sauce is the people working on the show. In every conversation, you get a sense of collaboration. It’s all about the dynamics between people, which creates a certain energy, and that energy then translates onto the screen. From the actors to the crew to the assistants to the catering, there's always a back and forth,” he says. “I think BEEF prides itself on putting our individual selves aside for this higher good of creating something great. And that collaboration you feel between people? It cannot be beat.”