A Southern California country club is the site of all kinds of power struggles in “Beef,” the Netflix limited series from Lee Sung Jin that won eight Emmys in 2023 for its first season and came back with a new location, new cast, new storyline … And it has a new composer, Finneas O’Connell, who has written film scores for “The Fallout” and “Vengeance” and a TV score for “Disclaimer” alongside his work with his sister, Billie Eilish.
The songwriter and composer who often goes by just Finneas and the producer also known as Sonny Lee met up three years ago while they were on the campaign trail with “Barbie” and the first season of “Beef,” respectively. They began work on this season when Lee pitched the idea and O’Connell came up with a demo suite of music inspired by the sounds of a country club: sprinkler systems, lawn mowers, golf balls being hit. The suite, heavy on synthesizers and pianos, got him the job, and he continued writing music as Lee filmed the show.
“I just kept churning out the material,” said O’Connell, who also wrote music to the edit of the last few episodes. “From an instrumental standpoint, I wanted the music to feel unique and interesting. And from a storytelling standpoint, I wanted it to provide a feeling of nostalgia and a feeling of anxiety, to hopefully underscore whatever the characters are going through.”
At one point, Oscar Isaac’s character, Joshua, noodles around on a Moog synthesizer in his man cave, so O’Connell embraced that instrument as well. “The more I incorporated it, the funnier his relationship with the Moog got,” he said. “I bet Oscar is good at everything, but I thought that Josh should be not very good at producing music. So I reined myself in on the piece of music I wrote for Oscar to play, because I thought it should feel like a guy who’s not very good at this.”
All the Songs in 'Beef' Season 2
He worked to make sure that the electronic rhythms that drove the score could also put viewers on edge, and kept in mind that “Beef” is all about small conflicts that escalate into huge conflicts as the season progresses. “The first couple of episodes have almost no percussion at all, and that was by design,” he said. “And that’s a great rule. If you’re making a song and you save the drums for chorus 2, they’re gonna feel huge, you know? So doing that across a season of a TV show was awesome.
“There are some little blippy drums in Episode 1 and 2, and by Episode 3 there’s some more percussion. There’s a bunch of percussion in Episode 5, which is the lost-dog episode, and then by 7 and 8, there are beats. That was a great tool to make stuff feel like it was building.”
One key was to let musical themes morph over the course of the series. “The ‘Vicious Thoughts’ theme, which became the primary theme of the show, only plays in the first episode over the younger couple,” he said. “It’s a ‘check this out, look at how optimistic and hopeful they are’ love theme. And then you hear a melancholy reprise of that as Oscar Isaac’s and Carey Mulligan’s characters are deciding that their relationship is not savable. And by the end of the season, you’re hearing it very subdued, very bare, just humming and acoustic piano.
“But you’re also hearing this super-abrasive, distorted saw-synth version. It felt really satisfying to have the theme played in different stylings with different emotional intent.”
Finneas had already been writing music for “Beef” when he was offered a one-scene role as what he refers to as “a jerkwad version of myself.” He jumped at the chance to act with Isaac and poke a little fun at himself in a scene set in the resort’s gym, and he even got to write a snippet of music to go with his own performance.
But he was more amused by what Lee added later. “You usually shoot scenes in silence, except that Oscar has taken to wearing an earwig, a little invisible earbud so you can listen to music,” he said. “When I was on the set, he was like, ‘You want to listen to something? We’ve been listening to the score.’
“I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to listen to my score. I’ll be too distracted.’ So we listened to some LCD Soundsystem, which was really fun. But then when I got into the editing room with Sonny, he had put ‘Bad Guy,’ Billie’s song, on the speakers in the gym, as if I were working out to my own production. I thought it was great that he made that choice. It made the character so much more annoying and funny.”
This story first appeared in the Limited Series/Movie issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
