Rating: **

Beef as a word to describe aggravated conflict came into popular desi lexicon very recently after Priyanka Chopra Jonas admitted she had been maltreated in Bollywood.

I felt the same watching ten lengthy, selfimportant titillating-at-top-bland-at-bottom American episodes of Beef on Netflix about Korean-Americans who seem fixated on creating unnecessary and totally irrelevant problems which could easily be avoided.

The premise of a man and a woman Danny and Amy , played with grating casualness by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, as they are called, getting into twisted battle after a road-rage incident, would have made a watchable if not an extraordinary rom-com.

Don’t him Wong, but Yeun is no loverboy actor. He is best suited for roles that require him to eat, sleep,fornicate,repeat.Any extra layering in his characters is impractical.

With lead actors who are dull and pettifogging, the ten-episode series Beef causes grief. It is overblown and undernourished. The skeletal plot scarcely manages to rise above the mundane. Most of the time we are left wondering what the fuss is about.And would someone please plant two tight slaps on these two grownups behaving like spoilt little kids who will do potty at a party when they are not given large enough portion of the birthday cake.

The writing is clearly infantile.It wants us to embrace Amy and Danny’s temper tantrums. But we can’t,as the writing doesn’t evolve, or involve us as spectators. Very often it feels as if scenes are being created to let the two protagonist create embarrassing scenes.

We get that they are angry. Hell, I would be too if my lifestyle was so mercurial that I wouldn’t know if I coming or groaning….Yes, that is a sexual reference, pointing towards a conversation in an early episode that has Amy accusing her dumbstruck husband of having “vanilla” sex with her. Maybe he should try butterscotch.

Beef is riddled with problems which are no problem at all. It relies heavily on situational swipes at suburban conventions but fails to give us a valid motive for the characters’ collective premature midlife crisis . Consequently it feels overburdened with nothing.

The twists in the plot and the jibes at the characters’ sense of selfimportance eventually begin to wear very thin. We are finally left looking at people who add shades of dark to their spick and span lifestyle out of boredom.

At some point the battle between the two road ragers dissolves into some kind of a shared relationship, which is absurd, really. If Beef is trying to say two superficial unhappy people are likely to be happy together , then its sense of collective misery is so nebulous, it can’t tell a fun battle of the sexes from a dreary war of nullity, gender be damned.