[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Beef”] 

Creator Lee Sung Jin and his team perfected the agony of making a series of compounding, poor life choices in Season 1 of “Beef.” In Season 2, the show expands in every conceivable way — including the way that cinematographer James Laxton chose to shoot the Netflix show. 

Laxton, taking the baton from Season 1 DP Larkin Seiple, wanted to preserve how the show articulates power dynamics between characters through framing, lighting, shot scale, and movement. But with Season 2 following multiple couples — country club general manager Josh Martin (Oscar Isaac) and his wife/frustrated designer Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan), country club workers Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), and new country club owner Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and her husband Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho) — Laxton chose a camera that would give him the largest of large formats. 

“We chose to shoot on the ARRI 265, and I think we were actually the first longform show to use this camera,” Laxton told IndieWire. “It’s a 65mm size sensor; the format’s been around for quite a while. But the camera provided the same size as I’ve used in films like ‘Beale Street,’ but the compact size of the camera provided us a speed where we could move [our setu[s] from steadicam to handheld back to studio mode.” 

However cinematic the formats on streaming shows become, speed and efficiency are still some of the names of the game for television. The camera choice allowed Laxton to focus on one of the major creative challenges of “Beef” Season 2 — finding an intimacy with each character and providing a perspective by which we see their relationships come together and pull apart. Laxton also needed to connect the audience with each individual character’s perspective through the complicated web of emotions and goals they have. 

Some of that Laxton achieved by sculpting the overall look of “Beef” Season 2 with a set of ARRI DNAs. “They have this really beautiful sense of modern glass meets old vintage character and fullness,” Laxton said. “It’s a blend of things and, in many ways, rides between eras and that spoke to me in a sense of generations, of cycles that’s so important. I didn’t want it to be dated or super modern, but to find a way to feel like you’re feeling each of these generations all at the same time.” 

That said, it’s never just about picking the right gear. Laxton is able to craft a sense of generational clash and cycles moving into each other through careful composition, a mirror of how Lee’s writing shows how Austin and Ashley aren’t so very far away from the problems that Josh and Lindsay are dealing with — such is the fate, perhaps, of couples who love “Aftersun.” 

Nowhere is that visual sense of cycle clearer than in the final shot of the season, which begins with Chairwoman Park visiting the grave of her first husband and rises up into a samsara that includes all the characters in the same image, each in a different stage but all part of one whole. “This show is so much about these generations and how each of them connects and finds connection,” Laxton said. “We needed to see all of them at the same time and find a way to gain perspective on each of their lives. It seemed the best way to do that was to be observational, in a way, and not be close on each one, but provide distance to be able to absorb the stories we were just witnessing.”

“Beef” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.