- Warning: Major spoilers for "Beef" episode nine ahead.
- "Beef" premiered on Netflix on Thursday and stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong.
"Beef" showrunner Lee Sung Jin said that he had to walk back his original idea for the show's penultimate episode, joking that Netflix and A24 asked if he was "OK" after he outlined it.
Lee spoke with Newsweek about the ninth episode, which represents a shocking tonal shift for the show. "Beef" stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as Danny and Amy, two people whose road rage interactions spiral into an all-consuming feud. In the episode, Danny's cousin Isaac's (David Choe) decision to ransom Amy's daughter spirals into a violent shootout that leaves two people dead.
"I knew that I wanted everything to hit the fan," Lee told Newsweek. "We'd been stretching this rubber band for eight episodes now, I knew I needed the thing to snap."
Lee told the publication that the original outline of episode nine was "even crazier, with so many more deaths" other than the two that occurred on-screen.
"But it was too much, and Netflix and A24, rightfully, were like, 'You OK?' And so we brought it back," Lee told Newsweek.
Lee told The Hollywood Reporter that he wrote the original outline "under duress" while shooting the show. After getting "walked back" from a larger slaughter fest, he revised the episode while keeping in mind what its most important story elements were — Danny and Amy's relationships with their respective family members.
In the end, the two people who died in episode nine were two white members of the show's majority-Asian cast, but it wasn't deliberate.
"The natural byproduct of some of that revising was more people staying alive," Lee told The Hollywood Reporter. "So I don't know that it was necessarily intentional that that happened, but it's certainly an interesting outcome."