Long Story Short isn’t your typical animated fare.
From the creator of Bojack Horseman and Undone, it’s a sprawling tale of the highs, lows, and everything in between of a Jewish family, the Schwoopers (a mix of the parents’ last names, Cooper and Schwartz). And while the show is exceptionally, delightfully Jewish, it’s more than accessible enough for anyone who doesn’t know the difference between a menorah and a hanukkiah.
While animated sitcoms like The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers create a sense of timelessness in which characters never age, Long Story Short jumps around through the years, leaping decades forward and backward at will. This shift in storytelling allows for a remarkable nuance and emotional depth to the characters. Like Bojack, Long Story Short shines brightest when it gets emotional—and the show delivers a moving, achingly beautiful fourth episode. It’ll have you racing to the phone to call your mom. Get those tissues ready!
Episode 4, “Shira Can’t Cook,” finds Shira Schwooper (Abbi Jacobson) and her wife, Kendra Hooper (Nicole Byer), finding a school for their twin sons to attend. They’ve fallen in love with Altman Academy, but the school only has 12 spots available for new students—and Shira and Kendra want two of them.
There’s a potential way in, however, as the school is holding a potluck for prospective students. This sends the perpetually anxious and tightly-wound Shira into overdrive, and she wants to make a good impression by bringing an entrée. Kendra is too busy to cook, and Shira is notoriously awful in the kitchen.
An attempt to rein Shira in falls on deaf ears. “We’re a lesbian couple with biracial Jewish sons. We’re impressive enough,” Kendra tells Shira. But Shira’s having none of it: “It’s like frickin’ Bridgerton over here!”
Shira elects to make knishes, a favorite dish of her mom’s. They’re a traditional (and delicious) Ashkenazi Jewish dish with a filling (typically mashed potatoes) baked in dough—a highly ambitious project for someone who, in Kendra’s words, “can’t scramble an egg.”
Shira could simply call her mother and ask her for advice, but she doesn’t. From what we’ve seen of her relationship with her mother, Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), it makes sense that she doesn’t reach for the phone. To say their relationship is fraught would be an understatement. The pair have always rubbed each other the wrong way. Shira has never felt good enough for her mom, and as a middle child, her mother didn’t dote on her like she does her brothers.
There’s another big reason that Shira can’t call her mom. We discover in “Shira Can’t Cook” that Naomi has passed. Part of Long Story Short’s time-jumping structure means that major life moments like a divorce—or in this case, the death of a major character—are delivered to the audience in passing. Shira laments to her brother Avi (Ben Feldman) on the phone that “When she died, I knew there’d be no more big moments, but I wasn’t ready for all the small stuff I’d no longer have access to.” While Naomi’s death comes as a shock to us, for Shira and Avi, it’s something they’ve been processing for a year.
Shira tirelessly tries to make knishes, with one failed batch after another. No matter how hard she tries, she just can’t replicate her mother’s relationship. But she’s finally made them, and Kendra happily approves. But when Shira tries it, her face is overcome by disappointment. “It’s off,” she says, and throws them all away. “What’s wrong with them?” Kendra asks in disbelief. Fighting back tears, Shira responds, “They’re not my mom’s.”
It’s a bracing moment for Shira, a character who struggles to be vulnerable. No matter how complicated her feelings are towards her mom, she’s still her mother. Sure, the phone call would probably be passive-aggressive and drive Shira crazy, but it would be worth all the pain in the world just to hear her mother’s voice again. Making knishes is no longer about getting her kids into a school—Shira needs to feel close to her mother again. She gets the recipe from her father, Elliot (Paul Reiser), and gets to work.
Long Story Short cuts between Shira cooking, Kendra talking with Elliot, and their kids’ soccer game. Elliot reveals Naomi worked tirelessly to find food her fussy daughter would eat, and when Shira loved her knishes, she stuck to them—even though they were extremely challenging to make.
She’d complain about making it every time, but Elliot says that was part of the process: “You do something hard, so they know that you love them.” We see Shira complaining about cooking the knishes, just like her mother did, while Elliot speaks. Shira starts to tear up when she reads a note in Naomi’s recipe, increasing the garlic: “Shira likes it garlicky,” with garlicky underlined.
Admittedly, I had to rewind to see the note, because I was crying so much at this tender and surprising moment that I couldn’t see anything on the screen.
In this moment, Long Story Short so perfectly conveys how food connects us, and how our parents struggle in ways we could never understand as children, all because they love us—even if, for Shira, she struggled to feel that love when her mother was alive. But here, in this moment, Shira feels more connected with her mother than ever. Shira makes a perfect batch of Naomi’s knishes, and cries while eating one: “They’re just like mom’s.”
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