George TsagkarakisEight episodes. Five hours and 49 minutes. That’s the entire ask if you want to walk into Monday’s Emmys having seen the show with the most nominations on Netflix’s board.
Beef season 2 pulled 16 nominations and already has three wins at the 2026 Emmys. The ceremony is Monday, Sept. 14. You have time.
The cast alone justifies the evening
Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan lead, with Cailee Spaeny, Charles Melton and William Fichtner filling out the rest. The season is a serious contender across the Limited/Anthology categories, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, which Beef won back in 2023 for its first season.
Isaac is up for Lead Actor and Mulligan for Lead Actress. Melton landed Supporting Actor, Youn Yuh-jung got Supporting Actress, and creator Lee Sung Jin is nominated for both Writing and Directing.
Season 1 took home eight wins in 2023, including Lead Actor for Steven Yeun and Lead Actress for Ali Wong. Season 2 has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 89%.
Forget everything you know about the road rage season
Season 1 followed two strangers whose lives tangled after a road rage incident. Season 2 throws out the cast and the story entirely and keeps the themes: materialism, identity formation, and the friction between social and wealth classes.
This time the setting is the fictional Monte Vista Point Country Club in Southern California. Joshua (Isaac) runs the place. His wife Lindsay (Mulligan) is there too. Two employees, Austin (Melton) and Ashley (Spaeny), record the couple fighting and decide that footage is worth something.
The blackmail is just the opening move
Austin and Ashley go after Joshua out of desperation, chasing financial stability. Ashley is drowning in medical debt. She gets a promotion at the club she’s entirely unqualified for, and from there the season becomes a chain of power plays and manipulations that eventually exposes a cover-up involving the club’s owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung).
The show runs dark comedy and psychological drama at the same time, which is why the emotional whiplash lands.
Do the math on your Sunday
Episodes range from 31 to 54 minutes. The first five take 3 hours and 23 minutes, so you can knock out most of the season in an evening and finish the rest without much effort.
Among Netflix titles, nothing else is close this year. The Beast in Me sits second with nine nominations and Black Rabbit third with seven. Beef has 16.
The competition for the top Limited or Anthology prize is real, though. HBO Max’s dark comedy DTF St. Louis has already collected six awards at the Creative Arts Emmys.
Critics liked it, with reservations
Season 2 didn’t get the rapturous reception the first season did, but the reviews are strong. IndieWire gave it an A-, writing, “The most beautiful moments of Lee’s epic tale appear at times when all the noise has been stripped away, and each character has to face a truth they’ve been fighting so hard to ignore.”
A 7/10 review put it this way: “Though it sometimes seems like a bug rather than a feature this time around, Beef season 2 still maintains the electric unpredictability that is becoming a hallmark of the show.”
Press play and the polish does the rest. The visuals, the performances, the way the story unspools. You’ll be three episodes deep before you think about checking the time.
