The Biggest Beef Season 2 Moment Is Based On Another Real-Life Incident

Warning: This article contains minor spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of "Beef," "All the Things We're Never Going to Have."

We've got to find Lee Sung Jin, cover him in bubble wrap, and protect him at all costs. The "Beef" creator/showrunner, writer, director, and executive producer has now delivered two brilliant seasons of the Netflix series and is showing no signs of stopping. By now, viewers ought to be familiar with the basic framework of the show: Characters encounter one another at the worst possible moment in their day-to-day lives, which leads to an ever-expanding series of complications or complete misunderstandings, and it all builds to a violent finale that nobody could've ever seen coming from the beginning. More than that, however, both seasons are linked by an even more fascinating similarity. According to Lee, Season 2 is yet another instance where fiction is based firmly in reality.

If you remember, the debut season of "Beef" was revealed to be inspired by a real-life road rage incident that Lee experienced firsthand. This time around, the story unfolds when young lovers Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) catch their boss Josh (Oscar Isaac) in the midst of a volatile and borderline abusive argument with his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan). While speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Lee explained how he came up with the main premise for the next chapter of this anthology. As he tells it, he was desperately trying to come up with pitch after pitch for where to take things next ... until "a real-life incident smacked me in the face." I'll let Lee take it from here:

"[I overheard a] heated debate in my neighborhood coming from a couple's home. That idea of juxtaposing younger love versus older love felt really interesting to me."

History clearly has a funny way of repeating itself, doesn't it? It also makes me slightly nervous about the kinds of scary situations that Lee Sung Jin keeps finding himself in, but at least he continues transforming those real-life moments into fictional gold with "Beef." Unlike last time, though, the confrontation that inspired everything to come involved someone other than Lee. And according to the multi-hyphenate, it was the responses that followed his retelling of events that played the most significant role in what "Beef" Season 2 turned out to be.

Later in his conversation with Entertainment Weekly, he described how he noticed a stark generational divide between how his friends and family reacted. As he explained:

"When the real-life incident happened where I overheard that altercation in the neighborhood, when I was retelling that story to people [...] younger peers were like, 'Oh my God, did you call the police? Is everything okay?' Whereas my age and older peers were kind of like, 'I mean, who amongst us hasn't [been there]?'"

Without giving anything away, that massive difference in mindsets and worldviews drives much of what follows throughout the season. Ashley and Austin are all but traumatized by what they've seen without context, while Josh and Lindsay attempt to downplay an admittedly ugly moment that they insist most couples their age inevitably experience. To Lee, "That dichotomy was the north star" for this installment of "Beef." Much like in Season 1, the show's willingness to explore such complicated and ambiguous subject matter is a major reason why this remains must-watch TV.

All eight episodes of "Beef" Season 2 are now streaming on Netflix.