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Spoilers for “Beef” Season 2 Episode 4 “Oh, the Comfort, the Inexpressible Comfort” follow.
“Beef” Season 2 has earned comparisons to HBO series “The White Lotus,” a fellow anthology with no shortage of horrible rich people, while those themes of class conflict and people trying to climb up the ladder also evoke the Oscar-winning film “Parasite.” But the fourth episode, set largely in an emergency room, might have you thinking of medical drama “The Pitt” instead. But while “The Pitt” offers a mostly positive (if warts-and-all) depiction of hospital workers, “Beef” directs its trademark anger at them, seared by an unjust world.
While there’s no direct evidence that “Beef” Season 2 is set in the same universe as Season 1, there is another beef, this time between two couples: working-class Gen Z’ers Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), and upper-class elder millennials Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan). Ashley and Austin work at the country club that Josh manages; when they stumble upon a heated fight between him and Lindsay, they blackmail them with video evidence to get Ashley a better job. It’s not simple greed, though. Ashley found out in Episode 1 that she had an ovarian cyst that could become fatal, and she had no health insurance. Ashley and Austin spend most of this episode in an emergency room as Chekhov’s cyst bursts.
Most people (besides insurance lobbyists) can probably admit the profit-driven healthcare system in America is a cancer on public health. Medical debt is a problem afflicting many Americans; sick people are known to avoid visiting the doctor because they can’t afford it, and starting crowdfunding campaigns for medical expenses has become far too normalized in America. But it does create a healthy atmosphere for social satire like “Beef.”
Beef Season 2 says doctors are part of the healthcare system problems
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“Oh, the Comfort, the Inexpressible Comfort” delivers some deserved potshots at health insurance. Ashley, at the worst possible time, learns what a “deductible” is (the amount an insured person must pay before the insurance provider starts contributing). Once she does, she asks a very good question: What’s the point of having insurance? But the satire doesn’t end there.
Circling back to “The Pitt” comparison, that show explores how burnout-inducing a hospital work environment is. That’s part of the premise: each season is a single hospital shift unfolding in real time. “The Pitt” has won accolades not just from TV viewers but also from medical professionals for its depiction of an emergency room.
But unlike “Beef,” it’s also sympathetic to hospital staff who choose to make that their life. Their work can burn them out because they care about helping and saving their patients. In “Beef,” though? Every member of the hospital staff is rude, dismissive, condescending, and bureaucratic to Ashley. This emergency room is operated like a stereotypical Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), except people’s lives are on the line.
Ashley and Austin spend hours sitting in an overcrowded waiting room. They’re only admitted when Ashley collapses in the waiting room. When a doctor asks how much pain Ashley is in on a scale of 1-10 and she answers “10,” the doctor tries to convince her otherwise. It turns out Ashley misinterpreted how the pain scale works (she thought 5 was the neutral rating, “like Letterboxd”), but keep in mind the doctor never explained that either. Not wanting to deal with a potential emergency, she writes Ashley off as an idiot and ignores her insistence that she’s in pain.
Beef satirizing U.S. healthcare adds to a larger theme
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When Ashley and Austin are brought into the ER, Austin notices that a security guard’s viewing window is cracked. When Ashley needs emergency surgery, Austin (who’d stepped out) tries to run back in to be with her. Instead, the guard (the one with the cracked window) stops him because he’s cutting the entry line. As Austin is tempted to punch the window, we realize the crack came from someone else who actually did so.
The surgery removes Ashley’s ovary, which could complicate her wish to have kids. Worse, Austin tells her that her ovary was removed only because she had the surgery too late. Doctors ignoring women’s pleas that they’re in pain is a well-documented problem; “Beef” is fiction, but Ashley’s situation feels all too real.
The sequence unfolds with a dream fakeout; Ashley “wakes up” and is told everything is fine, but then wakes up, for real, in reality. It reminded me of yet another show, the survival drama “Yellowjackets,” where, in Season 2 Episode 6, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) suffers a stillbirth but first has a fantasy in which her baby is born healthy. Except that Shauna was trapped in the middle of nowhere with no doctors. The resources to help Ashley were nearby, but were kept from her.
Ashley focuses her rage on Josh. As manager of an elite country club, he brushes shoulders with the rich, including successful doctors (while also being constantly reminded he’s still beneath his “friends”). In this episode, Josh offered to get Ashley seen more quickly if she deleted the video of him and Lindsay. Ashley refused, so Josh did too. Even for life-saving healthcare, the rich and connected get to cut lines and leave everyone else stuck, drowning in an overburdened bureaucracy.
“Beef” is streaming on Netflix.