‘BEEF’ Creator Lee Sung Jin Reveals What Inspired Amy & Danny’s Final Scene
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for BEEF Season 1.]
BEEF has arrived and delivered one of the wildest road rage stories ever told. The question is, would any of the zany things Amy (Ali Wong) or Danny (Steven Yeun) experience have happened without their pivotal encounter at the beginning of this heart-pounding Netflix dramedy?
“I’m not sure if these particular things would’ve still happened, but I’m sure life would’ve found a way to have similar things happen, to try and wrestle up the issues that they’re trying to sweep under the rug,” series creator and writer Lee Sung Jin says of the journeys Amy and Danny take. What begins as a parking lot scuffle and cat-and-mouse road chase turns into an entanglement that ends in violence and catharsis by the season’s finale.
While the duo ultimately lead their own paths for much of the series, they’re constantly drawn back to one another, whether it’s Amy’s affair with Danny’s brother Paul (Young Mazino) which backfires on her marriage or Danny’s attempt to frame her for arson when the home he builds for his parents burns down due to faulty wiring he installed. The moments that blow up their lives are blamed on the road rage incident but are ultimately of their own making.
(Credit: Andrew Cooper/Netflix)
“They’re so trapped in their egos, not even like a pride sense, but in a more psychological sense, their sense of self,” Jin says. “They’re really trapped in that. I do think that they would’ve sabotaged their lives in other ways. But I’m curious what that would’ve looked like.”
In this version of events, Amy and Danny’s story takes a months-long jump forward in time toward the second half of the season only to have them reconvene in the most unusual of circumstances. After her life has been blown apart by the revelation of her affair with Paul, Amy is off to visit investor Jordan (Maria Bello), who purchased her small business earlier in the season. In an attempt to set some things right, she tries getting a piece of art created by her husband’s father back, only to get a call that her daughter has been kidnapped.
The unintentional kidnapper is Danny, who, while wanting to frame Amy, encounters her husband George (Joseph Lee), who had since discovered his true identity and role in their family’s life. A scuffle leaves George unconscious and Danny fleeing in one of the family’s cars which happens to have young June (Remy Holt) in the backseat.
Going back to his apartment, Danny tries to figure out his next move, but his cousin Isaac (David Choe) is waiting there with revenge in mind. As they receive Amber alerts on their phones, Isaac requests a ransom reward and Amy offers to let him rob wealthy Jordan’s collection of artifacts in exchange for June’s return. Things go haywire at Jordan’s house though as alarms are set off, panic rooms are enabled and turn deadly, and the final straw is reached. “I really wanted to pull the rubber band for as long as one possibly can before it snaps,” Jin says.
(Credit: Andrew Cooper/Netflix)
By the end of that ordeal, Danny has escaped through a drain pipe and taken off in one of Jordan’s many vehicles, Amy learns George has been granted emergency sole custody of June, and one more chance run-in on the road leads Amy and Danny to take their rage to the extreme, driving headlong over a cliffside.
Together, they’re forced to rely on one another in order to survive, and deep conversations lead to better understanding, but it doesn’t solve their problems, which are left lingering in the air by the season’s end. Once they manage to escape the predicament they’ve put themselves in, the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight … until a gun is at the end of it, with George shooting Danny.
The final shot of the season is of Amy laying down beside Danny as he appears to be on life support in the hospital. Could all of it have been avoided? “In many ways, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten out of it without each other, maybe they would’ve just been stuck shooting themselves in the foot over and over and over again. It really took someone at their equal extreme to get them to break out of that,” Jin points out, noting the ruts viewers find Amy and Danny in at the beginning of the show.
Amy’s struggling with home life and the role she’s leading when the series begins, whereas Danny’s on the verge of suicide, unable to fulfill the promises he’s made to his parents and feeling like a failure.
While Amy and Danny may be two sides of the same coin in their self-destructive behavior, they’re never romantic. Still, there’s a soulmate-level bond in some respect that Jin acknowledges: “What I wanted to do is you have two people who are separate, really stuck in their status quo and their routine and in their worldview. And then this incident comes along that kind of shakes them out of it.”
“The reason they worked so well together by the end is that they’ve just been stripped of every attachment that they could possibly have. And so all you’re sitting there with is yourself kind of naked in front of this other person and, like, ‘Oh, hey, you look like that too.’ And, I think that that bond, that connection was something that I wanted to highlight through the writing.”
While the show takes wild swings, Jin is adamant that the story was always a complete piece when initially pitched to Netflix. “My pitches tend to be really involved,” Jin shares. “I try to leave as little to the imagination as possible. So the ending in that final scene actually came from conversations between myself, Steven, Ali, and A24 before we had even set it up at Netflix.”
He further reveals that the last shot of Amy and Danny in the hospital bed was Wong’s idea. “I was struggling to find what the right setting and feeling was, and she pitched the whole crawling into the bed moment. It was really nice to have an endpoint.”
Whether that’s the end of Danny and Amy’s story will remain to be seen as BEEF enters the awards season in a limited/anthology series capacity.
BEEF, Streaming now, Netflix
