We started watching Beef, the new Netflix series based on the idea of road rage, and stuck with it for three episodes. Why are characters now so over-the-top? This is the same problem I had with Succession: nobody seems that believable to me. They all look like the products of writers’ rooms where the writers are having great fun coming up with the most outrageous characters, and giving them the most scurrilous lines, while ignoring the commonplace and the everyday. Of course, it’s much harder to make entertainment out of the quotidian, but people like Pinter and Mamet did it quite well.
