Beef Season 2: Metaphor, Engine, and Breaking the Rules

Episode Transcript: Beef Season 2

This episode we are going to be talking about Beef by Lee Sung Jin. One of the things that makes Beef a particularly interesting show to study is that it was originally designed as a closed-end limited series. In bringing it back for a second round, Lee Sung Jin transformed it into what’s called an anthology series, where we actually are meeting a completely different set of characters, but in a related engine.

There are some things that Lee Sung Jin does in this show that you just absolutely never see. If you’ve listened to my last few podcasts about engine, you know that the biggest fear that any showrunner has is breaking their engine. The biggest fear any network executive or streaming executive has is breaking engine — creating a show that feels different.

Yet in Beef, Lee Sung Jin and his writing team make a lot of choices that seem to be breaking the very engine upon which Beef is built. And yet the series is, despite some small issues that we’ll talk about, for the most part a total delight to watch.

So we’re going to be talking about how they get away with it. And then we’re going to be expanding our conversation to get even deeper, to talk about the concept of metaphor, and the connection between metaphor and theme.

Almost every show has an underlying metaphor for the writer: something that they are wrestling with, questioning, trying to say. The show is actually a representation, an allegory, a way of exploring a profound concept. Beef is no different.

We’re going to talk about the moment in Episode 8, the season finale of Beef Season 2, when a character actually gives us the metaphor — says the metaphor. Then we’re going to be talking about how you can use metaphor as a guidepost, as a North Star, as something to navigate by when working on your own screenwriting, whether that’s a limited series like Beef, a TV show, or even a feature film.

Just a quick warning about spoilers: I am going to be spoiling significant elements of Beef Season 2. We’re going to be talking about the final episode, and in order to talk about using metaphor as a North Star and how an anthology series is built, I’ve got to share how this thing’s actually constructed. So if you have not yet seen Beef Season 2, now is a great time to hit pause.

The Game That Built Season 1

If you listened to my podcast about Season 1 of Beef, you already know the concept of the game of the scene. We discussed this improv concept, how it threads through all kinds of screenwriting, particularly in Lee Sung Jin’s work, and how Lee Sung Jin and his writing team use this concept to build the world and the escalation of rules of this script.

The way that Beef Season 1 works is quite simple. It starts with a simple little beef, a little parking lot squabble between two characters who can’t back down. The game upon which the whole season is built — what was intended to be a closed unit — is just an escalation of that game.

The characters are just going to keep doing the same pattern again and again, and it’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to watch it build, and we’re going to feel the tension rise.

Before long, these characters are going to be doing stuff that we never could have imagined they would do. And it’s not until the very end that we’re going to break the game, change the game, and create a different relationship between these characters that gives us a feeling of catharsis.

Why Limited Series Are So Hard to Write

This is the amazing thing about building a limited series. A limited series is like a feature film and also like a TV show. It’s one of the hardest forms of the art form to create, because it needs to do everything a feature film does, taking a character on an A to Z change.

It’s got to be worthy of this many episodes, this many pages. It’s got to take us on a journey that’s so complicated that it demands this amount of time from us. It needs to feel like the characters are arguing and changing, bringing us to that point of catharsis, just like a feature film does.

At the same time, just like a TV series, the pilot needs to set the blueprint, the rules of the world, and every episode needs to feel the same and also different. It needs to have an engine that keeps you coming back for this feeling episode after episode after episode.

So limited series are very hard to write. They’re hard to write because they’re gigantic, and because they’re doing everything a feature does and everything a TV show does, technically, all at the same time.

Beef, the original Season 1, was designed just to be a limited series. There’s a reason I always warn students about writing limiteds. It used to be nearly impossible to sell a limited series as a new writer — there were just not a lot of outlets doing that. Now things have changed. There are actually quite a few limited series getting made, Beef one of many.

But as soon as you start writing a limited series, you know that you’ve narrowed your market, because there are simply more outlets doing traditional TV series than there are outlets doing limited series. The reason for that is financial.

When you run a successful TV series, you’re spending most of your money up front. You’re building all the sets that you need. All the layout is at the beginning. And if it’s successful, you can basically keep running that engine — season 1, season 2, season 3, season 4, season 5. You’re making money again and again and again until you run out of steam.

So from a producer’s point of view, a series is a larger financial vehicle than a limited series, because limited series end.

One of the things you want to think about if you ever write a limited series is to keep a pitch in your back pocket for what the series version might be, because there’s a good chance somebody is going to ask you. And even if they don’t ask you — even if they’re delighted to make your limited series — there’s a pretty good chance that if you are successful like Lee Sung Jin was, you’re going to have to figure out how to do season 2.

How Shows Survive (or Break) Their Own Engines

We’ve seen shows do a great job of this. We’ve seen shows struggle with this, and we’ve seen shows unable to do it. For example, we have not seen season 2 of The Queen’s Gambit or Chernobyl. In some shows, either there’s not a desire or they haven’t found a way to do it.

We’ve seen shows struggle, like True Detective. Season 1 of True Detective: pure genius. Season 2 of True Detective breaks the engine. It doesn’t feel the same.

The reason for that is that the primary thing we’re watching in Season 1 of True Detective is not the mystery. We’re watching the question of how did Matthew McConaughey go from being this guy to being that guy — from being the guy in the flashbacks to being the guy in the frame. That’s the real mystery of the show, and that’s actually the feeling that we’re coming for.

So when we get to season 2, we’re watching a different engine, and we lose that Matthew McConaughey mystery, and the show feels different. It takes them a couple more seasons to fully get their sea legs again and establish a new engine that feels like the show.

The Anthology Gamble in Beef Season 2

Here in Beef, Lee Sung Jin is doing something different. The first thing he’s doing, like True Detective, is an anthology series. Now, we don’t see a lot of these. Probably the quintessential anthology series, of course, was The Twilight Zone. And again, the reasons are financial and creative: we fall in love with characters.

If you’ve taken any of our TV writing classes, you know that the primary driver of engine is character. We fall in love with characters. They become part of our extended family. We invite them into our homes episode after episode, week after week, binge after binge.

It’s nice going to dinner with them. And just like a holiday dinner, our experiences with them are filled with laughter and joy and pain and frustration and embarrassment — just like a family Thanksgiving, coming together with our own complicated families. We come to depend on that Thanksgiving. We like it enough to keep showing up.

When you build an anthology, every season is different characters. That’s kind of like showing up for somebody else’s Thanksgiving and going, hey, do I like these characters more than I liked the last ones?

We see this in White Lotus. Season after season, there are different characters driving, but they pull beloved characters from previous seasons in to give us that feeling of continuity. What Lee Sung Jin is doing in Beef is actually much more radical. There’s not a single character from Beef Season 1 who’s in Beef Season 2. So from the very beginning, Lee Sung Jin is taking a huge risk.

Normally, when we don’t have characters coming back, engine is built through other elements: structural elements, story elements, thematic elements. Just like if we were going to Thanksgiving with a brand new family, there might be some traditions that give us a similar feeling even though it’s done slightly differently, or there might be similar roles that the characters play even though they’re different people.

But what Lee Sung Jin is doing in Beef Season 2 is actually even riskier than that. Here come the spoilers: Lee Sung Jin is making season 2 of Beef not about beef. It’s a different game.

Feeding Us What Looks Like the Engine

So how does he get away with it? How does he keep himself from breaking his engine? What he does is he feeds us what looks like the engine. We’re watching episode 1 and we’re seeing all the pieces get set up for a new beef. We’re watching the pilot, and here are our main characters.

We’ve got Oscar Isaac’s character, Josh, and Carey Mulligan’s character, Lindsay. This dysfunctional couple that really loves each other. This selfish couple who really care about each other. This unhappy and sometimes even mutually violently abusive couple who, in a way, are kind of meant for each other. They’re both kind of awful people, but there’s something beautiful about them together.

This is a very dark and complicated relationship, and they have two different sides they need to show. Josh runs a big expensive golf club, and he’s got a new boss: it’s been bought by a Korean billionaire, Chairwoman Park, and he’s got to keep his job and keep all his clients happy.

With Josh in front of people, Lindsay has to play the role of loving, proud, supportive wife. But alone, she is angry, disappointed wife. Angry, disappointed wife whose husband seems more interested in OnlyFans than he is in her. Angry, disappointed wife who didn’t get to have the baby that she wanted.

She didn’t get to have the dream she wanted either, because they planned to build a B&B together. They’re living in it, but so many years later it’s still not completed, because other priorities have taken over. In fact, the only baby that they have that they mutually love is their dog.

Don’t get me wrong, Lindsay’s not perfect either. Lindsay can explode in anger. Lindsay can be hugely selfish and self-serving. Lindsay can be manipulative. And Lindsay can be violent.

Then we’ve got a much younger couple. Josh and Lindsay are a wealthy, successful couple who feel like they’ve got nothing, like they’re barely holding on even though they have so much. And then we have a young Gen Z couple, Ashley and Austin.

Ashley and Austin are so young they don’t know up from down or down from up, but they are engaged to be married, and all they want is a child. They want the thing that Lindsay and Josh once wanted that they never got to have.

So we have a middle-aged couple in a failing marriage, and we have a young couple in an idealized marriage. They just love each other so much that we’re a little bit worried for them. Their ideas of what love is supposed to be are so idealized and perfect, they are so fresh out of the womb, that to them a single fight might mean the end.

Ashley works at the club in the lowest possible position. She’s got no money, no health insurance. Austin is a struggling personal trainer who’s doing his best stealing other people’s workout videos and re-recording those ideas as if they were his own. They’re both struggling to make it, and they have exactly the same feeling that Josh and Lindsay have: that they just don’t have enough. The only difference is they have each other.

So these are the moving pieces that we are aware of at the beginning. Josh forgets his wallet at the club and Ashley is sent to deliver it to him. Being a person who never does anything without her boyfriend, Austin comes along. They show up and Lindsay and Josh are in the middle of a terrible fight. The fight started with Lindsay destroying Josh’s man cave with a golf club — but by the time they witness it and record it through the window, it looks like Josh is threatening Lindsay with a golf club.

Austin wants to go to the police with this video, because to him, even though he doesn’t have it perfectly right, it’s very clear that Lindsay is being abused, and Austin wants to do the right thing. But Ashley is afraid that she’s going to lose her job if she does the right thing.

It seems like we maybe have a double or a triple beef happening here. There’s going to be beef between Josh and Lindsay within the couple. Maybe there’s a beef that’s going to develop between Ashley and Austin, the young idealistic couple. And then there’s going to be a beef between the two couples around this video. We are already pitching ourselves how this is going to escalate to bigger and bigger warfare.

This Isn’t Beef — It’s Beef Meets White Lotus

We’re so excited, because just like in Beef Season 1, we’re laughing, enjoying ourselves, having an amazing ride. The performances are so absolutely brilliant. As we get to Episode 3, Episode 4, we start to see this beef start to escalate — except something weird is happening. No big beef is breaking out.

The characters are not going to war with each other in the way that we expect, because the violence in Beef Season 2 is not the physical violence of Season 1. The game of Beef Season 2 is not the physical escalation of Season 1. It is emotional violence.

What Lee Sung Jin has pulled off here is so extraordinary, so hard. What he’s actually done is he’s tricked you into a different engine by showing you something that looks like the engine you came for and then slowly shifting your expectations. Before long, a few episodes in, you start to realize: this isn’t Beef. This is Beef meets White Lotus.

Like White Lotus, it takes place in an extremely high-end place for the 1%. In White Lotus, it would be a hotel. Here, it is a golf club. Like in White Lotus, everybody’s running their own kind of scam, trying to survive. Like in White Lotus, it is really about the pressure that drips down from the billionaire class, down through the upper middle class, down to the classes below. Like in White Lotus, we’re watching everyone fight for love and survival in a complicated world.

So what Lee Sung Jin has actually done is he’s taken the Beef engine and woven it into the White Lotus engine, creating a hybrid that doesn’t feel exactly like White Lotus but doesn’t feel exactly like Beef either. He’s taken something that in Beef was a wild escalation and turned it into a slow burn. He’s taken something that was built in a past season around physical escalation and turned it into emotional escalation.

Metaphor as Your North Star

One of the reasons that he gets away with this is because he has a tremendous metaphor driving him. He has a North Star that he is navigating by that gives sense and order to all of this. That’s his underlying code that lets him know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work in this show.

This show is built around the question of selfishness. It’s built around the question of whether love is actually possible, whether caring about other people is actually possible — or whether the things that we count as love and caring are actually just selfish attempts to satisfy self.

Whenever you’re building with theme, metaphor, or allegory, it’s important to know that it’s not for your audience. It’s for you. This is going to be the glue that holds your piece together. And it’s going to be the most interesting glue if it’s a glue you don’t totally know the answer to — a glue that you’re wrestling with.

Is there such a thing as love, or is it all just manipulation? Even when we think we’re loving someone, is that really love, or do we just act loving when it suits us, when it’s easy, when it gets something that we want?

A Web of Manipulation: Is It Love or Selfishness?

It’s not until Episode 8 that the theme is actually spoken, and it’s brilliantly spoken — what a brilliant performance by Youn Yuh-jung as Chairwoman Park. She gives this monologue. It starts around 23 minutes and 31 seconds into Season 2, Episode 8, the finale.

Before I share it — big spoilers ahead — let me catch you up on who Chairwoman Park is. Chairwoman Park is a billionaire who’s going to do things her own way, and she doesn’t particularly like Josh. She particularly doesn’t like Josh because Josh has been stealing money from the company.

He’s been manipulating Ashley — who manipulated him by holding him hostage with the video that looks like he’s abusing his wife. She’s manipulated him for a job for herself, and a job for her boyfriend, who, by the way, is not a physical therapist. He’s just a personal trainer. She’s manipulated Josh to get Austin a job with a forged certificate. She has pushed her hand with Josh; she has pushed Austin into a position of success because she needs health insurance and a baby, and her company doesn’t give her these things — so she goes to war for them.

Meanwhile, Josh is manipulating Chairwoman Park. He’s manipulating Ashley, because she’s not great at the bookkeeping job that he had to fire someone to give her in order to save his own butt. He’s manipulating her because he’s realized he can use her to embezzle money from the company — and then he can please his wife, and they can build their B&B.

Part of what’s driven him there is that after deciding with his wife that they’re going to save their marriage and build their B&B, they go to visit another guy who’s got an Airbnb nearby and find out he’s got $10 million of financing that they could never compete with. So now Josh is embezzling money because, hey, you’ve got to survive in this world.

We’re having this huge stratification of wealth, where some people have so much, and even the people who look like they have a lot feel like they’ve got nothing. So we’ve got everybody manipulating everybody else — for what? For stuff. For some selfish but also beautiful and love-driven desire.

Ashley needs health insurance. She’s got an ovarian cyst, and her company doesn’t care about her enough to even give her health insurance. She’s got to manipulate for it. She manipulates for Austin because she wants him to have a job, because they need to have a family. And let’s face it, their health insurance isn’t even going to cover what she needs by the time they pay their deductible.

And Josh — he’s being manipulated by this young woman who doesn’t even understand who he is. Everybody’s misunderstanding each other. She thinks he’s going to fire her. He thinks she’s trying to blackmail him. Nobody understands what anybody’s intentions are. Nobody sees the good in anybody. But he’s got to save his marriage, he’s got to please his wife, so he’s got a plan.

They’re all trying to serve their relationships, but they’re doing it in the most selfish way. Meanwhile, Chairwoman Park is manipulating everybody, particularly Josh, because she catches his embezzlement. But she’s got a problem of her own.

Her husband, Dr. Kim, is a very high-end plastic surgeon who’s doing these super luxurious spa and plastic surgery weekends for people at the club. But he’s a little too old for the job, and he keeps killing people by accident. So now she needs to cover up for her lover. It seems like maybe this is an act of love — but maybe it’s an act of self-protection. It’s hard to tell.

Dr. Kim, similarly: maybe he loves her, but he says he’s afraid to retire because he’s afraid of being discarded by her. So you can see all these motivations wrestling in the world of love versus selfishness. All these people mistaking each other’s intentions — and sometimes getting each other’s intentions right — but seeing the darkness in everybody else, making the worst assumptions, assumptions that assume that love does not exist, that there’s only manipulation.

Chairwoman Park needs to pay a lot of people off to protect her husband, but the problem is she’s already under investigation. She can’t open up a shell company to make these payments. So she starts to manipulate Josh by giving him a promotion, so that he’ll do what she needs him to do — which is to embezzle even more money to pay off the people who might get her husband in trouble.

So we have all these different levels of manipulation, of selfishness. But underneath all of them we have this question: is it love?

Chairwoman Park’s Monologue: Weighting the Cards Against Your Beliefs

It’s not until the very last episode that we finally get this extraordinary monologue that pulls together what this writer is actually doing. At this point, Chairwoman Park has taken everybody hostage. They’ve just managed to escape, and she’s captured them again, and there is no telling what she is going to do to them. Along the way, she has had her goons execute her husband — the man it seemed like she was risking her life to protect. Now they are all in the equivalent of a prison somewhere on her corporate estate.

This is what she says — and the broken English is my translation of how she is speaking:

“My second husband always said love is putting other person over yourself. But as soon as you’re born, you cry for mommy’s milk. You don’t care about her. You only care about yourself. Maybe you put others over yourself a few times, but only when it is easy. Universe is not designed for this. Thank God we survived billions of years from tiny cell to bacteria to monkey because we only care about self. That is why capitalism works. It is a system of nature, system of the self. Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They’re all the same, another way to serve the self. That’s all I was to Dr. Kim. That is all he was to me. That is why I’m not crying right now. That is why I’m not worried about any of you.”

It is a chilling and devastating monologue.

As a great writer, what Lee Sung Jin has done is he has weighted the cards in Chairwoman Park’s favor. Anytime you have an argument that you believe, you don’t want to weigh the structure of your film towards your argument. You want to weigh the structure of your film against your argument.

Suddenly what we’re seeing is that this entire season is built the opposite of the way Beef Season 1 is built. Beef Season 1 is about a beef that oddly leads to this weird kind of love. Season 2 is about these loves that slowly evolve into selfishness.

Season 2 is about how, from that very first moment in the pilot when Austin says, “Let’s go to the cops,” and Ashley doesn’t want to lose her job, every single element is showing you how love lives inside and underneath the system of capitalism. This is some dark Ayn Rand shit we’re looking at right now. We are in Chairwoman Park’s view of the world.

We have watched all of these people manipulate those that they claim to, or seem to, or actually do love — for their own needs and desires, for their self. We have watched how their infighting, their feeling that they don’t have enough, has actually empowered Chairwoman Park to do all the terrible things that she does. The need to protect the self is actually what is empowering the big baddie in the whole piece. And even she, the billionaire who’s got it all, doesn’t have the one thing that actually matters, which is love.

In the structure of Beef Season 2, we see Lee Sung Jin’s greatest fear about love: that maybe it doesn’t exist. And if you watch closely and really look at the structure of Austin’s relationship, of Ashley’s relationship, of Lindsay’s relationship, you’ll start to see that all of them, once they get on that slope of manipulation and blackmail, of trying to survive, of trying to protect the self, end up undermining the actual relationships that are presenting themselves to them.

Except Josh.

Josh Breaks the Cycle

Most of Josh’s journey has been as dark as everybody else’s. He has made selfish decision after selfish decision. He has embezzled, he has lied, he has empowered people who are bad. Then he goes on a little drug journey. Even that grows out of a manipulation: he’s trying to get Austin high so he can get the video from him. He tricks Austin into taking Bufo with him, but Josh is the one who ends up high on Bufo, which is apparently a version of DMT.

In that Bufo moment, he has a revelation about selflessness versus selfishness. He has a revelation about love, and he starts to make different choices.

All of this builds to this really incredible moment where he’s in the equivalent of a cell, a room he can’t get out of. On the other side is Lindsay, his wife, who’s divorcing him — but who he’s come all the way to Korea to save. Lindsay warns him: hey, whoever goes to Chairwoman Park first is going to win. Those kids are going to try to screw us over, so let’s screw them over first. She’s going to perpetuate the cycle by giving Chairwoman Park what she wants, which is for someone to take responsibility for the things that Josh did.

Meanwhile, Austin’s been carrying an SD card that has proof of everything Chairwoman Park has done. He’s even found a way to escape and bring it to the woman he’s realized he actually loves: Eunice, Chairwoman Park’s former assistant. Together they have an opportunity to go to the police, and it looks like maybe their love is going to survive. Until, in her responses to him, Austin realizes Eunice doesn’t love him.

So instead of bringing her the SD card and saving everybody, Austin goes back to Ashley and does it her way: if we just give Chairwoman Park this SD card that clears her, then we’ll get everything we want.

Once again, we have another example of selfishness trumping love. The character choosing love that’s not love — that’s manipulation — in order to get the capitalist thing that they want, and empowering the very forces that have left them in this desperate position, that make them so desperate to manipulate in the first place. Empowering the very person who is actually oppressing them.

This piece is about capitalism, but it’s about how our selfishness is what empowers capitalism. It’s about how our selfishness is what empowers the vast disparity of wealth and greed. How our selfishness is what destroys the loving community and society that we actually want. How our selfishness is what empowers the cycle of moral compromise and powerlessness, and undermines love.

It looks like all of this show is going to prove exactly what we most fear — that love doesn’t exist. Except for Josh. Josh comes up with his own solution, a solution that will save his life and save everybody. His solution is to give himself up, to allow Chairwoman Park to put all the blame for every bad thing she’s done on him, and in this way to break the cycle of his own selfishness. To break the cycle that has trapped him in this miserable relationship, that has cost him his family, that has cost him his dreams, that has led to the person he loves most in the world not feeling loved by him.

Seeing his sacrifice, Lindsay will promise to wait for him — because he’s going to jail for eight years. But being Lindsay, she won’t.

This is what’s so incredible about where this piece ends. We end in the cycle. We’re not watching love triumph, but we are watching one person break the cycle by letting go of his need to protect self. And what we find at the end is that the only guy who’s okay is the guy who went to jail. The guy who suffered the most.

Austin and Ashley are now playing the role that Josh and Lindsay were playing at the beginning. They are now running the golf club: happy marriage front-facing, and unhappy one behind closed doors. Lindsay: new husband and a kid. But who’s she looking up on her phone? Josh. The guy she lost.

This is not a show that pretends it’s easy to break the cycle of selfishness. This is a show about how it’s necessary. That is the North Star that is guiding Lee Sung Jin. He’s using the engine of Beef and he’s using the model of White Lotus, but he is twisting it to his own ends to lead you to a place that you never expected.

The One Place Beef Season 2 Stumbles: The Genre Switch

And yet — and this is just my opinion — for all the brilliant things about the show, and I absolutely love season 2 of Beef, it does not have, at least for me, the same emotional impact as season 1. The reason for that is also about engine.

In season 1, the primary engine, the primary game, is physical violence. In season 2, the primary engine is emotional violence, selfishness, and manipulation out of desperation. But an odd thing happens as we get towards the final couple of episodes: the genre changes. Suddenly we are in a world not of emotional violence but of physical violence.

Unlike White Lotus, which always starts with a dead body, this show has moved us from the place where we’re expecting physical violence to the place where we’re expecting emotional violence. It’s not a big problem, but it’s something to think about. Once you set the rules, those are the rules.

The thing that’s just a tiny, tiny little bit off at the end of Beef, if we compare this very brilliant second season to the first, is that there’s a genre switch in those last couple of episodes that just doesn’t feel totally organic — that doesn’t feel like we’re growing out of where we started.

That comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast, and in my first podcast about Season 1 of Beef. It comes down to game. In this piece, we’re playing an emotional game. We’re playing a sucker punch, a bait and switch, where you think you’re going to watch a violent game and you’re actually going to watch a different kind of game.

As much as we’re enjoying the murders, the violence, the bloodshed, and the action movie element, there is a part of us that recognizes that one of these things is not like the other — that this and this don’t feel organically, fully connected. Now, that is a tiny little quibble on a really brilliant show. But it’s something to think about.

Finding the Metaphor in Your Own Writing

As you’re thinking about your own writing, I want you to think about what your metaphor is. What are the relationships in your movie, in your show, in your limited series — what are they a metaphor for? What is the engine that is driving your movie, your episodes, your season? What is the feeling that is guiding us, and how organically can you allow every element that develops in your script to grow naturally out of the ones before?

Your audience is never going to know your North Star, even if you tell them, like Chairwoman Park so brilliantly does. Your audience is never going to be able to perfectly articulate your neurosis. But they are going to feel you wrestle with it. They’re particularly going to feel you wrestle with it if you weight your script, your structure, your obstacles against what you believe.

Put the most beautiful aria into the mouth of the worst person in your script, and let her be convincing. Because when you do that, you test your own beliefs. You raise the question of whether or not your beliefs transcend those greatest obstacles — and whether your audience, like Josh, can overcome the obstacles in their own life that make them complicit, and really choose something new.