The miraculous thing about BoJack Horseman was how the animated Netflix comedy managed to place the darkest, most melancholy material right alongside bursts of pure, concentrated silliness. Yes, it was the story of a clinically depressed, alcoholic, perpetually disappointing washed-up celebrity (the titular horse-man). But it also had room for ridiculous characters like Vincent Adultman, three kids stacked under a trenchcoat who said things like, “I went to stock market today! I did a business!” One episode might feature BoJack going on an epic bender that results in the death of one of the former child stars of his Nineties sitcom; another would place BoJack’s housemate Todd into a slamming-doors sex farce that culminates with a brawl where everyone is covered in antique lube.
BoJack was created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and produced by Lisa Hanawalt. They switched roles for Tuca & Bertie, another series featuring anthropomorphised animals and a mix of the tragic and the absurd. Now they’re collaborating once again on Bob-Waksberg’s animated Long Story Short. The family comedy has no horsemen or bird-women in sight, but it continues the team’s impressive ability to balance extreme melancholy with delightful lunacy.
Long Story Short bounces back and forth through time — going as far back as the Fifties, and as recent as the present day — to tell the story of a loving but dysfunctional Jewish American family. Matriarch Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and husband Elliott Cooper (Paul Reiser) have given their three children — Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) — the portmanteau last name of Schwooper. Naomi is manipulative, melodramatic, and passive-aggressive: When she and Elliott are arguing about plans for a catered reception, she complains, “The Rosenbergs never did anything as bad as this seating arrangement, and they got the chair!” Elliott just tries to go with the flow, often making things worse by not being more assertive. Oldest child Avi is a music critic who attempts to connect with his wife Jen (Angelique Cabral) and daughter Hannah (Michaela Dietz) by sharing his favorite songs with them. Shira is a clumsy mess who’s never quite gotten over various childhood traumas, and eventually marries and has kids with Kendra (Nicole Byer). And youngest son Yoshi is impulsive and highly distractible, forever bouncing from one crazy scheme to the next without considering the consequences.
We see the siblings as children, teens, and at various stages of adulthood, and as a result come to learn how being raised by Naomi and Elliott shaped each of them into the people they are in the present. We even get a few glimpses of Naomi as a little girl, so we can better learn how she became this opinionated, difficult, but also loving maternal figure.
Bob-Waksberg and his collaborators retain their impressive gift for devising ludicrous comic set pieces to go alongside the heavier material. One of Yoshi’s many would-be careers is driving a ham-themed food truck, which gets into a fender bender so that he’s sandwiched on either side by trucks carrying lettuce, tomato, and bread. (As a perfect comic button to the sight gag, Yoshi then calls Naomi to say, “Mom, it happened again!”)
Left unspoken in the subplot about Yoshi’s “Hambulance” is that he’s become a purveyor of non-kosher meats, as part of a family that wrestles with its Jewish identity. Naomi is focused on continuing all the religious traditions, while her kids are more ambivalent; Kendra, who converted, feels more spiritually connected to it all than Shira does. In its observations about cultural Judaism versus religious Judaism, Long Story Short is the most overtly detailed show about Jewish-American life since Transparent (a series that’s since been memory-holed for a variety of unrelated reasons), as Bob-Waksberg finds appealing ways to make the specific universal, and the universal specific.
Along the way, Long Story Short offers remarkable Rube Goldbergian comic set pieces, like a teenage Shira inadvertently making a spectacle of herself at a school dance, or the payoff to a story about Yoshi getting a job selling mattresses that come in a small can. And there’s some terrific social satire, particularly in an episode set in 2021 where Avi has to deal with the many ways that Covid broke people’s brains. But there’s also a lot of thoughtful, poignant material about traditions, grief, childhood trauma, and the ways that family can be both the best and worst part of your life.
Any team-up between Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt is an event worth celebrating. Just be very careful when arranging the seating chart.
All 10 episodes of Long Story Short are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole season.
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