Lee Sung Jin on the breakthrough that led him to ‘BEEF’
7/23/202646 min
The second season of Lee Sung Jin’s Netflix series ‘BEEF’ earned 16 Emmy nominations. Set at an exclusive country club, it stars Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan in a story about class struggles and generational differences. The storylines of both seasons were inspired by real events in Lee's life. Before ‘BEEF,’ he spent two decades in comedy writers' rooms, often feeling alienated as the only Asian person on staff. “That's what people first thought of me when I first started – I was the diversity hire." He spoke with Tonya Mosley about the years he spent masking to fit in, and the breaking point that changed how he writes.
TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new Apple TV series ‘Lucky.’
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Tonya Mosley· Host0:14
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is creator, writer, and director Lee Sung Jin. The second season of his Netflix series Beef just earned 16 Emmy nominations, including nominations for writing, directing, and executive producing. Lee says he writes what he knows, and what he keeps returning to are the pressures people carry but rarely talk about: money, class, and the anger we sometimes swallow to get through the day. The idea for Season 2 began when Lee was walking through his neighborhood and heard a couple arguing with each other inside of their home. Later, when he told the story, his younger friends were horrified. "Did you call 911?" they asked. Friends his own age had almost the opposite reaction. They shrugged. Lee couldn't stop thinking about that split, what it revealed about what different generations expect from relationships and what happens when the private lives of one generation collide with the values of another. That became the new season of Beef. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan play a married couple whose ugliest private fight is secretly recorded by two young employees, Ashley and Austin, played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles