Netflix’s ‘Unfinished Beef’ Review: Joey Chestnut Defeats Kobayashi

Netflix’s “Unfinished Beef,” a live competitive-eating special follows in the plodding footsteps set forth by the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, the July 4 spectacular on Coney Island. But what it recalled even more vividly were the human-interest freakouts Fox aired around the turn of the century, like “Man vs. Beast” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” Broadcast live on Labor Day from Las Vegas, the competition between pro hot-dog eaters Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi had more than a whiff of only-in-America decadence and excess.

The special, which ran a little over an hour, built to the 10-minute showdown between Chestnut and Kobayashi, including short, produced packages introducing both parties to the viewer. “I love putting an obscene amount of food in me. It’s what I love doing,” Chestnut told viewers, demonstrating the exercises he performs to keep his jaw strong. (This is no small thing; Kobayashi’s career, we were told, was derailed by a 2007 jaw injury.) 

Chestnut and Kobayashi are career-long rivals in the competitive-eating space, in which entrants are judged on how much they can ingest in a closed-ended period of time; by the time they were stuffing sausages into their mouths, their mutual enmity seemed clear (if nebulous in its origin), as did their differences in style. Chestnut, whose past style of dipping his hot dog buns in water to lubricate them was expressly banned under Netflix’s rules, seemed blithe and unaffected — a machine, on a mission from which nothing could dissuade him. Kobayashi, who ended up a 17-dog deficit behind Chestnut, brought a challenging humanity to the contest, a sense of struggle, as he rocked back and forth, urging the food to go down.

This is the latest in Netflix’s ongoing endeavor to make itself a destination for live events, and — as with the recent Joe Rogan comedy special they aired, albeit for different reasons — there was a can’t-look-away quality to it all. That Kobayashi lost, and by a wide margin, may somewhat overshadow the surreality even of his own feat — in 10 minutes, he ate 66 hot dogs. (It was originally marked as 67, but the judges, in a show of officiousness that should indicate Netflix’s goofily straight-faced approach to the whole endeavor, deducted a dog based on the weight of food he had spilled on the floor. Chestnut, meanwhile, ate 83.) Both men excel at something that not only has no practical utility but, if one stops and thinks about it for more than five seconds, is fairly obscene in a world where unquelled hunger exists. Both, too, are milking it for all it’s worth; this year, Chestnut was banned from the Nathan’s contest, which he has won 16 times previously, after he accepted a sponsorship from the meat-free brand Impossible Foods. On stage, cramming meat into his maw, he wore patches on his sleeves advertising a personal wipe marketed for men to use in the bathroom. There was a certain bleak, cause-and-effect logic to the ad placement. 

Their excellence, such as it is, was placed into context by an earlier segment, in which three Olympians, competing as a team, could not eat as many chicken wings as could pro eater Matt Stonie. Wings, requiring the eater to denude a bone, have a certain grotesque quality that hot dogs lack; more soothing was watching the other opening act, Leah Shutkever, aim for and succeed in a new Guinness World Record by eating mass quantities of watermelon, which she devoured like Ms. Pac-Man munching dots, cleanly and with a certain elegance.

Brisk, professional, and to-the-point, the Netflix special used its fundamental professionalism to ironically emphasize just how strange a pursuit it was depicting. There was no real wink to the audience, no signal that those producing or those hosting (Rob Riggle and Nikki Garcia, both in utter earnest) thought that this was a strange way to spend a national holiday. The viewer was left, at some point deep into the 10-minute hot dog marathon, to wonder — is it the eaters, or the crowds in Vegas impassionedly cheering them on, who’s not getting it? Or is it me?