The praise for Netflix’s new series Beef, from creator Lee Sung Jin, has been near-unanimous — with most critics and fans saying the same thing about the 10-episode release from A24: That this is one of the best things to hit the streaming giant in years. Both the critics’ and audience scores for Beef on Rotten Tomatoes are still above 90%, and Netflix’s latest weekly tracking data shows that the series is #1 in the US and #3 in the world right now (having racked up 34 million hours of viewership globally in its first week).
The big question about the hit Netflix series now is will Beef get a Season 2?
The thing to keep in mind here is that Netflix’s usual pattern is to study a release’s performance over the course of its debut month before announcing whether we’ll get more of it or not. That also goes for existing Netflix series, and it’s not unusual for the analysis stretches past a month. Fans have now been waiting, for example, for more than a month about whether they’ll get a new season for Ginny & Georgia, and almost a month now for official word about the fate of Shadow and Bone.
With that in mind, Jin proceeded down a dual track. He explains, in a new interview, how Beef was meant to feel complete if Netflix does decide to leave the series here with only 10 episodes. But — he also mapped out a plan for three seasons. Just in case.
“I wanted it to have a conclusive feel just in case,” he says, in an interview with Rolling Stone. “But there are a lot of ideas on my end to keep this story going. I think, should we be blessed with a season two, there’s a lot of ways for Danny and Amy to continue. I have one really big general idea that I can’t really say yet, but I have three seasons mapped out in my head currently.”
I’ve said it before, meanwhile, that Beef is an early contender for best Netflix series of the year. For a closer look at the series, check out our earlier coverage of the show — which is built around a road-rage incident in the opening episodes, and unfolds from there into a richly-drawn portrait of two extremely universal and very interesting characters.
