The life of a Jewish family is presented as a collage of memories across ten episodes of this new Netflix adult animated dramedy.
Ten years ago, Raphael Bob-Waksberg premiered his first animated television show on Netflix with Bojack Horseman to widespread acclaim, and followed that up with the metaphysical drama Undone (albeit in a co-showrunner role with fellow Bojack writer Kate Purdy) that took its characters beyond the realms of time and space with beautiful rotoscoped animation. Bob-Waksberg has finally returned to Netflix with Long Story Short which has already been renewed for a second season, but if it’s anything like this wonderful first one, Bob-Waksberg is three for three in producing stellar streaming content with well-crafted characters, gorgeous animation and thought-provoking material surrounding familial bonds, generational trauma, and the complexities of Judaism in addition to the absurd but beautiful experience of life itself.
Long Story Short is an animated sitcom following the Schwooper family siblings: level-headed Avi (Ben Feldman), tomboyish Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and eccentric Yoshi (Max Greenfield) at various periods of their adulthood, but each episode begins with a memory from their childhood when they were raised by their overbearing matriarch Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and bumbling but supportive father Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser). That sounds like a straightforward premise, but what makes this a unique show to binge is its nonlinear structure.
Every episode takes place at a different place in time in the adult lives of this family, and follows a different character; the pilot sees Avi taking his college girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) home to meet his family and attend Yoshi’s bar mitzvah and Shira is single, only for the following episode to take place years in the future, when Avi and Jen are married and raising their daughter Hannah (Michaela Dietz), and Shira is married to her workaholic wife Kendra (Nicole Byer). The season even goes to moments after various characters have passed away, only to jump back to when they’re alive and a familiar presence in the lives of the Schwooper siblings.
This approach does ask Netflix bingers to do some heavy lifting, but also offers the opportunity to experience this new series as a Chris Ware comic book come to life. Like reading the often kaleidoscopic amount of panels in his stories, no matter the order in which one watches these episodes, viewers will still empathize with the neuroses of each character and how frequently this ensemble is haunted and hindered by the past. By proposing spectators balance where the show is in time with all the life events that Avi, Shira and Yoshi will and have already experienced, Long Story Short makes even terminal Netflix scrollers feel these siblings’ psychological burdens on an experiential level, getting the full picture of Bob-Waksberg’s latest.
But that’s not to say Long Story Short is enjoyable for those preferring a casual watch. More than once, an episode begins on an event from one of the Schwooper siblings’ childhood, only to then jump forward by at most a decade after the amazing title sequence to show the incident’s lasting effects on a given player. An example comes at the start of the second episode where Avi’s choice to abandon playing with Shira at the beach starts a rift between the two because she constantly feels she never gets what she needs from her older brother as an adolescent or an adult. Despite that, there’s still an unconditional love and respect between the two when they joke about their mother’s irrational demands in casual conversation.
These characters are very layered and have a lot going on that makes their arcs engaging throughout the first season of Long Story Short; Avi may be even-keeled and laid back on the surface but deals with insecurities and is himself critical about the practices of Judaism, and Shira feels her mother’s judgment even when she’s not in the room and holds grudges against people who’ve slighted her in the past, just like her matriarch.
Meanwhile, Yoshi has an animated manner of speaking and struggles with too many directions due to ADD and dyslexia among other mental conditions, but there’s more to him than just his disabilities: he yearns for self-acceptance and is trying to find his calling in life going from odd job to odd job. Their mother Naomi’s complicated childhood is detailed in just enough passing to show how it morphed her into the judgmental and anal retentive figure she is to her children, and even Shira’s wife Kendra overextends herself at her job because she and her family had to work twice as hard as everyone else to get ahead as African-Americans in a white society.
Long Story Short also excels in its animation by separating itself from Bojack Horseman in the simplest of ways; just giving every character dots for eyes makes them endearing to onlookers, while establishing shots appear reminiscent of refined, child-like drawings, from their multiple colors to little details like the windows of an air traffic control tower in the background not entirely colored in with the texture of markers. The show is also very funny in multiple styles of humor just as Bob-Waksberg’s first Netflix series was, from the absurdity that ensues when Yoshi sells mattresses in a tube for a tech startup and verbal jabs at schools banning books to dry background gags like a car accident involving trucks selling different components of a ham sandwich, and a meeting of concerned parents Avi attends that emulates a cult gathering.
As excellent of a first season this is, the show’s non-linear structure does make its narrative more aimless here than in Bob-Waksberg’s previous Netflix hit. There is a small narrative thread that sporadically appears for a couple episodes but otherwise, it’s evident that the bigger picture of this series won’t be clear until the show’s conclusion. But what’s there as far as well-rounded personalities, levity, thematic material and storytelling in the first season of Long Story Short is fascinating and interesting enough to keep anyone who starts it engaged for the long haul.
Audiences will look to point out the differences in the title sequence of every episode depending on which character or relationship is its focus, be endeared by the show’s compelling characters, come away with a better understanding of Jewish culture upon the show’s deconstruction of many Judaist standards as well as where they come from, and want to start the show all over again upon seeing events mentioned in passing earlier in the season. Netflix made the right move by already renewing this for a second season, because it further assures Bob-Waksberg and his team can continue to build this toward a grandiose statement about the human condition and experiencing life that this show aims to reach. To make a long story short, there’s no better adult animated show on Netflix now than . . . well, Long Story Short.