Men's Health April 29, 2026 0 Comments

Lee Sung Jin’s Bold Vision for Beef: Why This Game-Changer Could Revolutionize How You Connect With Food—and Yourself

Ever found yourself spiraling down a rabbit hole after a brilliant TV show ends? That’s exactly what happened to me right after Netflix’s Beef wrapped up its second season. If you thought it was just another drama, think again—this series doesn’t just leave you hanging; it digs into your brain and refuses to let go. From revisiting epic tunes like the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mayonaise” to obsessing over Phoenix’s “Love Like a Sunset,” Beef’s soundtrack is as haunting as its storylines. And the genius behind it all, Lee Sung Jin, isn’t just throwing random chaos on screen; he’s crafting a midlife mosaic of rage, empathy, and the messy business of human connection that sticks with you long after the credits roll. Curious how a show about simmering disputes mixes with 2026 tech realities and deeply personal storytelling? Buckle up, ‘cause this isn’t your typical Netflix binge—this is Beef, raw and real, with all the subtle sneers and heartfelt punches that leave an impression.

LEARN MORE

11 min read

The following story contains spoilers for Beef season 2.

FOR TWO CONSECUTIVE seasons, Netflix’s Beef has ended—and immediately sent me down a rabbit hole. When the first season ended with “Mayonaise,” the 1993 Smashing Pumpkins song, I not only couldn’t stop listening to that song, but was suddenly revisiting every song of theirs I’ve ever loved (and, believe me, it’s quite a few). When Beef’s second season ended with Phoenix’s epic, two-part “Love Like a Sunset,” it not only moved me via its connection to the story of globe-trotting relationships and class I’d just seen unfold, but it instantly sent me back to all the time I’ve spent listening to the band’s perfect 2009 album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix over and over and over again.

“I mean, both bands did not get enough love in their heyday, in my opinion,” Beef creator Lee Sung Jin says on a sunny April afternoon, as he’s FaceTiming me from a drive in the very BMW that his season 2 star, Charles Melton, loved so much that he got the exact same one for himself.

Netflix

Much in the way that his musical choices infiltrated my brain for weeks on end, and his choice of vehicles seemingly did the same for Melton, Lee seems to have a knack for planting seeds in people’s minds that won’t soon go away. In an era of television where so much is disposable and instantly forgettable, both seasons of Beef have been the kind of transcendent, layered TV that sticks with you that we were more accustomed to with character-driven dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the 2010s.

Lee’s writing style will often make you laugh and maybe even cry in the moment, but he and director Jake Schreier (a frequent collaborator on Beef and other projects) are also capable of producing a scene, idea, or singular image that you’ll internalize deeply—and that may just pop into your brain days, weeks, or even months after the fact.

Even now, with Beef season 2 having been out in the world for nearly two weeks, it’s lingering. Simmering. Growing in people’s minds and estimation. The show’s story of escalating conflict between couples Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Melton) and Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) is only getting more viewers, more people resonating with its complex themes of life and morality, and more people to sit with the layered season of television they’ve just taken in.

Netflix

As the show continues to linger in our minds (and, we presume, yours as well), Men’s Health spoke with Lee about some of the biggest questions we still have about season 2, how the show was so personal to him, and what’s going on with his and Schreier’s work on a brand new—and super personal—X-Men movie.

MEN’S HEALTH: You’ve said that the story of Beef season 2 is particularly personal to you. How so?

LEE SUNG JIN: I’m 44, and like a lot of other elder millennials, I don’t think I’ve properly contended with the concept of time until the last few years. To me, the show Girls feels like yesterday. Suddenly, I blink, and we’re the old heads. I also have a one-year-old daughter now, and that’s completely reshaped my concept of time and of life, and it’s made me reflect a lot. In particular, I’ve been reflecting a lot about my youth. There’s this hubris that’s really been humbled over the last few years. A lot of my friends are either going through divorces or other life changes. There are a lot of deaths as you get older. And all this stuff is new. The writers and I had a very bonding time in the writers’ room going over all this stuff. The show itself isn’t borne copy-and-paste from my personal life. It comes from having these discussions with our writers and cast and seeing what comes of it, what emotions spring up, and then trying to distill them down and apply them to our characters. I’m in a self-reflective midlife mode, I guess.

MH: I love the way the show depicts our relationship to our phones—the way we text, the way we use apps. It’s integral to the way we communicate in 2026, yet so many shows and movies don’t quite get it right.

LSJ: For me, living in 2026, your phone is this extra appendage. I literally have a permanent dent in my pinky because I hold my phone a certain way. It’s become part of our human evolution: these horrible electronics are now an extension of ourselves. It would be foolish of us as a show to disregard that, but it’s not entertaining to just show people on their phones. So, how do we show that in a dynamic way that feels authentic to how we feel using our phones?

I’m really thankful for my creative collaborators in that regard. A lot of this was set up in season 1, but we took it and ran with it in season 2. We had this one VFX team member, Melissa Khan, who came up with the visual of scrolling through the apps to switch between them, which I thought was ingenious because that’s how it feels when we go through our phones. And our [sound] mix team worked hard on the click-clacking sounds when Austin’s upset at Ashley and he’s fast-typing his clapback. That’s how I feel when I’m replying angrily to someone.

Netflix

Finding those bullseye moments was important. “Do we want to boost the mix a little bit here?” “How fast do you want those clicks to go?” “What’s the best composition within the frame that isn’t going to overwhelm the audience?” Every little thing, every pixel, every font size, we pored over all those decisions to make it feel like a true representation of phone use in 2026. And I’m really glad that resonated because it’s something we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about.

MH: This season included an interesting examination of different types of male rage. Josh, for instance, doesn’t mind being a dick when he’s mad. He’ll yell, he’ll make himself big. Austin, on the other hand, is quiet and passive aggressive. How did you flesh out those dynamics?

LSJ: We really wanted to lean into the generational divide. Of course, whenever you talk about generations, you’re painting with broad brushstrokes and there are exceptions to this. But in terms of telling a story, when you have an elder millennial character who is at a tipping point, you want to show someone with a very thin margin of patience. Josh has been eating shit for a very long time. And I do notice that about myself and amongst my millennial peers, especially in the workplace. I noticed a shift between the way I am now versus the people-pleasing way I was in my youth. Life can just beat you down. I’m sure Josh was more like Austin when he was starting out at the country club.

Then we wanted to show the inverse through Austin, and we wanted to lean into the way these characters spoke to our actors. If you talk to Charles in real life, he’s just so empathetic. He does have some of that Austin energy, but in a good way. Austin takes it to an extreme. And Oscar, he’s the sweetest human being alive, but he very much knows what he wants and he will tell you. If something’s not working in the script, he will tell you. I’m trying to take what I observe about these different generations in real life and make them bespoke to our cast.

Netflix

MH: Austin also struggles with being a people-pleaser. At one point, Austin is getting Ashley a Gatorade in the ER waiting area, but he gives the last bottle of the flavor she wants to a random woman who asks for it instead. How did you bring that into the character?

LSJ: I mean, a lot of this is stuff I notice in me as well. Something like that vending machine thing happened to me in my real life. My partner Katie had a medical emergency at a local L.A. hospital. We were there for 10-plus hours, and I had a vending machine moment with a lady behind me, and my people-pleasing nature came out. I took the feelings that I felt on the day, wrote them down in my notes app, and saw which characters they can be applied to. So much of the plot of that episode was based on what Katie and I actually went through. To me, Austin’s character in that episode is tapping into something that’s in all of us.

Where is the line—especially with the dwindling resources, the dwindling Gatorades, in late-stage capitalism—between looking out for yourself versus looking out for someone else? That dynamic, that tug of war, is really at the core of marriage too. It’s at the core of love. Esther Perel talks about it a lot—that you’re just constantly ebbing and flowing between being an individual and being in a partnership.

MH: Josh, Lindsay, Austin, and Ashley all have very different views on the realities of fighting or arguing as a couple. Do you think fighting is healthy in a relationship?

LSJ: It’s all about how you fight and how you bounce back from the fight, or at least that’s what I’ve learned in all the self-help stuff I read and all the therapy I do. That’s just how life is—there will be disagreements, there will be bumps in the road. You’re two separate people. How can you have the same opinions and thoughts all the time?

At the same time, everyone has their boundaries. There are certain lines you shouldn’t cross, there are certain things you shouldn’t say. And should you cross them, how do you bounce back from that? How quickly can you bounce back? Can you have a healthy conversation about it and not let the resentment build? It’s really, really hard. But I also think a big part of the show is saying: No one has the answers. There’s no golden rule. We’re all different. We all have different stories. What works for one couple may not work for another. The big takeaway, at least for me, is: Who am I to judge? I’m hoping people watch the show and have a little bit more empathy for other people who are going through it.

Netflix

MH: The show explores all the big themes in a relationship while also gesturing at the little things that eat at a couple—like not being able to see Top Gun: Maverick in the theater. Was that fun to write?

LSJ: That scene was so fun to write. That episode was one of the few that pretty much stuck close to the first draft. We barely had to rewrite any of it, especially that fight. Tapping into the fights I’ve had over the years—through all stages of my life, with several different people—the consistent theme has been that when it all comes pouring out, you grab bag. Suddenly you’re bringing up the thousand things you’ve been holding onto. I love how in that scene, they rapid fire through 17 grievances that they’ve clearly been holding onto.

MH: What was it like going full action movie in the finale?

LSJ: It was something we wanted to do from the get-go. We had set out to go to Korea. I knew that was going to happen really early on, before I’d written more than two scripts. When we’re in the writer’s room, something I have to do is give a pitch to Netflix to tell them where the show’s going, and all I had for the finale was: “Oldboy-style fight in skin clinic with skin flying around.” I don’t know why, but that’s something I knew we needed to head towards.

To be able to get all the different narrative pieces to connect in a way that would get there was very satisfying. It was really, really fun to work with [director] Jake Schreier, who has designed some of the most beautiful oners ever, whether on the show Kidding or in his music videos, and [cinematographer] James Laxton. We wanted to craft a fight that is, on a filmmaking level, really propulsive and elevated, but then still find ways to dumb it down so it feels like Beef. I remember when we were rehearsing here in the U.S. with our stunt team, it was really cool but just didn’t feel like the show. So I said, “What if Cailee holds up a piece of skin and then makes Lindsay almost dry heave? Then she just narrowly misses a blow?” We even dumbed down the sound that Cailee’s hammer makes when she hits a guard with it. At first, it was really abrasive, then in the mix, we were like, “Let’s find the dumbest-sounding hammer possible, just the weakest sounding thud, like a kid tapping someone on their back.” Those little touches are what ultimately made us feel good that we weren’t losing our tone. Even though the stakes are heightened, we paid attention to all the “little stupid minutia,” as Oscar calls it, that are prominent throughout Beef.

Netflix

MH: You and Jake also worked on Thunderbolts* together, and you’re working on the new X-Men movie. Do you have a personal connection with X-Men comics?

LSJ: I wasn’t planning on doing another Marvel thing because I do have a lot I want to explore in my personal projects. But Jake is one of my best friends, and when he comes calling with X-Men…come on, you drop everything for that. I grew up waking up every Saturday morning and turning on the cartoon. I watched every single episode. When they came back with X-Men 97, I devoured that. The original Claremont run of the comics is near and dear to my heart.

What I’m excited about with Jake’s vision for the X-Men—and [Marvel president Kevin Feige and co-president Lou D’Esposito] are fully aligned with his vision—is that he wants to get back to focusing on the characters first. These are amazing characters with very rich backstories full of so much emotion. There are so many intra-team dynamics and relationships. There’s soapy stuff. And sure, there are political themes baked into the DNA of X-Men too, and those are evergreen, but we want to get back to character-first storytelling. We’ve been in the lab every day. I’ve been going into Marvel every day. We’re doing long writing sessions. Kevin and Lou are in there with us. It’s me, [co-writer Joanna Calo, who is the showrunner of The Bear], Jake, Kevin, and Lou. We’re in the trenches together and it’s invigorating. We all love these characters. I’m excited, and I think true fans will be excited too. I don’t take it for granted. This is the privilege of a lifetime. It’s the coolest IP out there, in my opinion.

MH: Beef season 3. Yes? No? Maybe?

LSJ: At the moment, I’d be perfectly happy if this was the last season. I think it’s been very emotionally taxing. It’s been very fun to see the discourse about the seasons, but currently, I think I’ve said everything I needed to say through this show. But you never know. I mean, I felt that way about season 1, and then the universe gave me new material. But at the moment, I would be very happy if this were the last season.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Watch Beef Here

Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.