In Long Story Short, the past is always present

Long Story Short, the new adult animation show from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, works.

The series (with a 10-episode first season now streaming on Netflix) works because it’s hyper-specific. It works because it’s universal. It works because it’s silly. It works because it’s profound. Like the much-loved, much-rewatched BoJack, Long Story Short is occasionally uneven but its ultimate effect is hilarious and tender and sad all at once.

The show introduces us to a liberal, middle-class Jewish family in California — mother Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein from House), father Elliot Cooper (Mad About You’s Paul Reiser), and their three children, Avi (Ben Feldman from Superstore), Shira (Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield from New Girl), who all go by the last name Schwooper. (Naomi and Elliot have elected to smoosh rather than hyphenate. Maybe this will catch on.)

We follow the family’s story — stories, really — by switching out perspectives and hopscotching across decades, as the parents age and the siblings grow up and have children of their own.

The Schwoopers are atheist and religious, gay and straight, successful and struggling, and they all approach Jewishness and Judaism in different ways. Long Story Short is already being called “the next great Jewish comedy.”

There are Yiddishisms (ungapatchka feels due for a comeback). There are plot points that hinge on Halachic law. There’s an event referred to in the family only as “The Great Passover Candy Debacle of 2002.” And, of course, there are the inevitable Fiddler on the Roof references.

But while the details are Jewish — very! — Bob-Waksberg’s insights into familial love feel universal, thanks to the show’s radical structure, which allows for a nuanced exploration of memory and time.

It’s as if the series has taken the format of the family sitcom and dosed it with psychedelics. It would be a simplification to suggest the series uses flashbacks. There’s no fixed point to flash back from. The “now” of the series is always changing, moving through generations, through life stages, through the years from the 1950s to 2022.

Of course, it’s easier to move through time when the characters are animated — there’s no aging up or down with makeup, no dealing with three sets of child actors. Long Story Short starts scenes by announcing the year and then backs that up with period-specific visuals, like Avi’s ever-changing hairline.

This format allows us to see characters from different angles as we move through time. It demonstrates the way the past is always present in families, for good and for ill.

Naomi, for example, feels at first like the stereotype of the loving but critical Jewish mother. When talking with her children, she sometimes starts by saying, “Don’t take this the wrong way.” The wrong way inevitably gets taken, though, and then there’s drama.

Later, though, a short sequence introducing us to Naomi’s everyone-talks-at-once family in 1950s New Jersey lets us see why she thrives on catastrophe and conflict.

We see how the patterns of childhood persist into adulthood, those backseat car fights and we-tease-because-we-love dynamics showing up even decades later. We see the way siblings revert when they return home, even as adults — Avi still conflict-avoidant, Shira becoming once again the tetchy middle child, Yoshi remaining the sweet, somewhat overlooked screw-up.

We see how the past is shared, with affectionate inside jokes, with those family phrases that get repeated again and again (“Even schmucks are entitled…”). We see also how memories can diverge. An experience Avi barely remembers as a day at the Jersey Shore, Shira recalls as a trauma. The audience sees it both ways, at different times.

While Long Story Short is ostensibly more realistic than BoJack — there are no human-animal hybrids — artist Lisa Hanawalt, who also collaborated on BoJack, once again provides homely and handmade-looking animation, with clashing colours and offbeat little details.

It’s our world, but a little different. As with BoJack, the pop culture references are slightly shifted, so that teenage Avi plays an incredibly complicated game called Shepherds of the Fertile Crescent and listens to music by those famous ’90s bands the Stupendous Eggplants and Noiseforest. And Shira, who is gay, has a poster of the popular queer-coded television show Warrior Lady and Her Close Friend in her bedroom.

Among the everyday family dramedy, there are absurdist flourishes, like a subplot about wolves — not hybrid BoJack-style wolves but non-talking, quadruped wolves — that take over the school of Avi’s daughter Hannah during the pandemic shutdown and hang around even after the kids are back.

And while it can be cartoony, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, Long Story Short is also poignant and serious and sad. Just as BoJack expanded the possibilities of adult animation by dealing with such issues as addiction, depression and trauma, Long Story Short handles death, divorce, parent-child difficulties and the way we have collectively dealt with — or more often, not dealt with — the COVID pandemic.

Avi and Shira phone each other so infrequently that their brother-sister joke involves answering the phone by saying, “Who died?” But of course, if you track an extended family across 70 years, people do die.

Long Story Short is about the human experience, basically, our brief round of joy, grief, memory and time, which is why these 10 episodes rush by but also feel like they contain a multitude of moments and stories that could be infinitely expanded.

Thankfully, Season 2 is already in the works.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca