“Long Story Short,” a new animated comedy on Netflix, operates in the great Jewish tradition of believing that love is often best expressed through criticism. The matriarch, Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), expresses this idea during an argument with her daughter, Shira (Abbi Jacobson). “You think love is passive,” she says. “You just sit there and love. No. I push you because I love you.”
In that spirit, let me begin my review of this series, which I quickly came to love, with my one complaint, concerning the title.
It’s really a misnomer. “Long Story Short” is in fact an attempt to take a short story — the fleeting years of life we are granted — and extend it, drilling into moments from multiple perspectives, slowing time and reversing it, to squeeze out every drop of comedy and melancholy in one family over the course of generations.
The comedy centers on the Schwooper siblings — Shira, Avi (Ben Feldman) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) — whose surname combines those of their parents, Naomi Schwartz and Elliott Cooper (Paul Reiser). Each episode hopscotches among time periods, from the 1990s to the 2020s with the occasional detour farther back, so we come to know them as children, as young adults, as middle-aged parents.
Superficially, you could call “Long Story Short” a Jewish “This Is Us,” but it doesn’t use its time-traveling revelations to string along the audience with mysteries or drop plot bombs. We learn about major events — a character’s death, say, or a divorce — through passing lines of conversation, like eavesdroppers.
The creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (“Bojack Horseman”), instead uses the device to apply layers of character and family lore (such as “the Passover candy debacle”), setting up in-jokes and seeding conflicts. We see how seminal childhood moments become embedded in grown-up psychology, how old hurts fester and slights are nursed, how personality traits are handed down through generations like your grandma’s china or your father’s hairline.
Thus Avi, having chafed under Naomi’s demanding affection, becomes a music critic (a profession that also expresses love through judgment). Shira finds a partner (Nicole Byer) and wrestles with which elements of her upbringing she wants reject and re-create in her own family. (The curvilinear art, courtesy of Lisa Hanawalt of “Bojack,” underscores the idea of inheritance; Avi and Shira have Naomi’s rounded face, while Yoshi has Elliott’s elongated features.)
In “Bojack Horseman,” Bob-Waksberg traced his equine protagonist’s extreme family dysfunction. The Schwooper family is, in its bickering way, highly functional. But the series also has an acute sense of how families force people into roles. Elliott plays the conciliator, verging on pushover, to balance Naomi’s intensity. Yoshi, the baby of the family, has a lifelong feeling of being the “extra” child, which leads to an adult crisis of purpose.
Maybe the most interesting character is Naomi, who comes off initially as a stereotype — the doting, guilt-tripping, hyperdramatic Jewish mom. Preparing for Yoshi’s bar mitzvah, she bemoans the loss of her baby boy to manhood. “The last of my children is no longer a child,” she declares. “I am childless!”
But over the episodes, she reveals a toughness, complexity and sardonic turn of mind (enhanced by Edelstein’s impeccable line readings). In a late episode, the Schwooper children attend a function honoring her public service, where they learn that she had an empathy and a patience they never saw as her children. It’s a striking example of a universal phenomenon rarely depicted on family TV shows: the moment you learn that your parents are people, distinct individuals with rich lives outside of yours.
I don’t, however, want to make “Long Story Short” sound like a barrel of schmaltz. It’s wildly funny, swinging, like “Bojack,” from deep emotion to loony tune slapstick. (This is the kind of show in which, if a ham-delivery vehicle gets in an accident, it will be sandwiched into a multivehicle pileup that also includes a lettuce truck, a tomato truck and two bread trucks.) And like “Bojack,” it often uses one in the service of the other. This is a show full of big life moments, including more than one funeral, and funerals teach us that there is no laugh sweeter than the cathartic one that comes at an inappropriate time.
But where the comedy and drama of “Bojack” were rooted in surrealism — it was set in a Hollywood populated by anthropomorphized animals — “Long Story Short” is meticulously realistic and specific, especially as regards its characters’ Jewishness. This can be tricky; as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Nobody Wants This” have showed, cultural specificity can easily tip over into caricature.
Here, the religious deep cuts and Yiddishisms serve a theme: The tension between belonging to a tribe, be that a family or a religion, and remaining an individual. In the view of “Long Story Short,” at least, there are many ways of belonging. You can be devout or unbelieving, born-in or converted, you can embrace tradition or eschew it — but you’re still mishpocheh, a member of the clan, you still own a part in a story that repeats through time.
Time is the great subject of this series. Time moves too fast, which is the subject of two works of Jewish songwriters — “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof” and Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child” — referred to in the first episode. And time never goes anywhere, because every moment of the past is always present.
The series’ nonlinear narrative makes both points at once; on the one hand, time is a flat circle, always repeating, and on the other hand, you blink and suddenly decades have passed. In its sweet, astute way, “Long Story Short” is a kind of retelling of the ancient Catskills joke that opens “Annie Hall.” Life, it says, is a cyclical parade of heartbreak and repeated mistakes. And it comes in such small portions.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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