‘Long Story Short’ Review: Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s ‘BoJack Horseman’ Follow-Up Is a Funny, Heartfelt Exploration of Family, Memory and Jewishness

‘Long Story Short’ Review: Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s ‘BoJack Horseman’ Follow-Up Is a Funny, Heartfelt Exploration of Family, Memory and Jewishness

Television has long had a Jewish mother problem.

From The Goldbergs (Gertrude Berg’s medium-spanning landmark) to The Goldbergs (Adam F. Goldberg’s barely Jewish ABC hit), TV’s Jewish characters have too often seemed to emerge from the same mother — and I’m not talking about the mystical concept of the shekhinah, or the divine feminine.

Small-screen characterizations have too frequently leaned into one form of maternal representation for Jewish characters, a brash and clingy archetype fixated on marrying off their daughters, emasculating their sons and manipulating affections through occasionally grotesque culinary endeavors. These TV Jewish mothers are all played by Tovah Feldshuh or Susie Essman or Linda Lavin, or at least feel like they are. It’s not that this stock character is inherently bad, but I’ve seen more than a few otherwise admirable Jewish snapshots undone by an insufficiently explored version of it.

For at least half of the 10-episode run of Long Story Short, the new animated series from Raphael Bob-Waksberg, it seems that the animated dramedy is also going to have a Jewish mother problem.

Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), matriarch to the show’s central clan, is a demanding guilt ninja, a sultan of smothering, an exacting critic of rabbinic sermons and the life choices of her offspring alike. Naomi holds her family together and tears it apart in ways that feel instantly familiar in unsettling or reductive ways.

Shame on me, I suppose, for doubting Bob-Waksberg, whose BoJack Horseman is, it becomes increasingly clear with each passing year, the best show to be birthed under the Netflix banner.

As the series’ title implies, Long Story Short is a nesting doll of small stories that builds, lovingly, to something more emotionally resonant by the end of the first season, and whether she’s the protagonist or antagonist, Naomi Schwarz is the series’ linchpin. The ways that she comes across as a caricature are real, but like everything in Long Story Short, they’re a matter of perspective, of memory and of subjective myopia.

The character’s evolution and expansion are mirrored throughout the storytelling in Long Story Short, which marks Bob-Waksberg’s first solo series creation since BoJack. (Amazon’s Undone, which he co-created, was really Kate Purdy’s baby, while Tuca & Bertie, which he executive produced, belonged in spirit to Lisa Hanawalt.) The whole, which left me teary for much of the finale, is far more than the sum of its parts, which are generally entertaining and sometimes quite funny, though occasionally a bit forgettable.

Jumping around in time and geography, Long Story Short is primarily about siblings Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield), children of Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser) and the aforementioned Naomi Schwartz (Edelstein). The kids have taken the last name “Schwooper,” a thoroughly Bob-Waksbergian portmanteau, just one piece of the wordplay that will instantly remind fans of banter from BoJack Horseman, even if little in the overall tone or style of the Hanawalt-conceived animation is otherwise an exact match.

In vignettes closer to the present day, we see the difficulties facing Avi, his gentile wife Jen (Angelique Cabral) and daughter Hannah (Michaela Dietz); the reproductive challenges of Shira and partner Kendra (Nicole Byer), a Jew-by-choice; and Yoshi’s general complications finding his personal and spiritual place in the world. Those scenes are juxtaposed against moments from their upbringing, often but not always related to their Jewishness.

Long Story Short isn’t as visually or narratively audacious as Undone — one of many ballsy shows that Amazon deserves credit for developing and demerits for never knowing how to promote — but you can see that show’s fingerprints all over how Bob-Waksberg approaches memory, causality and the illusion that any of our lives is entirely linear. We’re impacted by things that happened before we were born and by events that we weren’t initially party to. One person’s formative trauma is another’s nostalgic footnote. We sit with each other at shared resting points or destinations, but we don’t always remember that we took different paths to get there.

It’s impossible for me to predict how non-Jews will respond to Long Story Short, any more or less than I could have predicted how people outside of the Hollywood bubble would respond to BoJack. But it’s nearly as hard for me to assert that there’s going to be any uniform reaction from Jewish viewers. This is by design.

At one point, Kendra, whose path to Judaism is traced in the superb seventh episode, observes, “There’s no one right way to be Jewish,” to which Naomi quickly interjects, “But there is! A progressive, egalitarian, conservative Judaism with an emphasis on ritual and community over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way it makes sense.”

In Long Story Short, Judaism is religious, but it’s as often treated as cultural, mystical and epigenetic, a series of practices and traditions that connect a disjointed people to happiness and trauma, that bring comfort and discomfort alike. There’s a lot of sincerity and layered introspection to how the show approaches Judaism, but it wouldn’t be a Bob-Waksberg show if you didn’t simultaneously have characters confusing minyans and Minions.

And I guess if you’re scared or alienated by the prospect of a show this overtly Jewish, I can tease plenty of parody Christmas songs, an episode featuring literal and metaphorical wolves, and a theme party emporium called BJ Banana Fingers, but also caution that death and divorce play a major role. I don’t think the frames in Long Story Short are as packed with as much rewatch-rewarding humorous depth as your typical BoJack episode, but it’s a beautiful and visually chaotic world full of color and detail, while the characters are expressively and likably rendered and shift over time in subtle and appealing ways.

It’s a lively voice cast, with several of the actors — Feldman, Jacobson and Greenfield in particular — aging up their characters in nice and understated ways. Within the deep ensemble, guest voices including Dave Franco, Gina Rodriguez and Danny Burstein pop in supporting roles. Edelstein has the most difficult of the series’ tasks, playing Naomi as the broad and cartoonish cliché that we’ve grown to expect and then re-contextualizing the character beyond those initial expectations. She and Bob-Waksberg don’t fully correct television’s Jewish mother problem so much as they expose how lazy other shows — sorry, Nobody Wants This — are when they start in the most obvious of places and fail to go anywhere more refined.

Long Story Short works more frequently on a “smile and nod in recognition” level than a “laugh out loud” one, and it doesn’t shy away from placing moments of sadness and joy side by side in ways that aren’t always easily digestible. We laugh at funerals. We’re miserable at prom. A bat mitzvah can be devoid of religious merit and a dingy motel room can be a holy place. The villain of a short story can be the hero of a novel.

Long review short, Long Story Short might not hit with everybody who loved BoJack Horseman, but it’s full of small, immediate pleasures before delivering something potent and completely relatable by the end.