The conventions of the animated family sitcom haven’t changed much in the 36 years since The Simpsons set the template for shows like King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers. True to the cartoon medium, the characters are outsize and their adventures over the top. And, in a custom that has been key to their longevity, time doesn’t really pass from season to season. Unencumbered by the growing or deteriorating bodies of human actors, these series are set in an eternal quasi present, within which cultural references are constantly updated yet (with the exception of a recent Hill revival that fast-forwards eight years) everyone stays around the same age.
In Netflix’s Long Story Short, BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg uses the elasticity of animation to warp time in a very different way, dropping in on a singular Jewish family a couple dozen times from the 1990s to 2022 (and once in 1959). Funny, idiosyncratic, philosophical, and warm, if occasionally more sentimental than BoJack fans might like, it ties together generations-spanning threads of love and resentment to create an intricate web of characters and relationships.
At the center of that web are siblings Avi, Shira, and Yoshi Schwooper, whose last name progressively combines those of their father Elliott Cooper (voiced by Paul Reiser) and mother Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein). Eldest son Avi (Ben Feldman) is introspective, self-righteous, determinedly secular. Anger defines Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the middle child. Their much younger brother, Yoshi (Max Greenfield), is the oddball of a family that, as Avi’s quiet, blond girlfriend notices in the premiere, was never itself a paragon of laid-back normalcy.
As it yokes formative scenes from the Schwoopers’ youth to vignettes that trace the impact of those moments on their adult lives, Story takes up Jewish identity as a central theme. Yiddish words pepper conversations. The Holocaust is never far from anyone’s mind. One standout episode recounts Shira’s wife Kendra’s (Nicole Byer) circuitous conversion to the faith. Competing visions of and attitudes toward Judaism arise. (While Oct. 7 falls outside of the first season’s time frame, Story has already been renewed, and I hope it will have the courage in Season 2 to probe this fraught era for Jews around the world.) Naomi is such an archetypal Jewish mother—pushy, controlling, critical, passive-aggressive, self-dramatizing—that she often reads as a caricature. But she is also, we eventually discover, its heart.
Bob-Waksberg has an eye for humorous details that ring true. Paired with a great voice cast and scribbly animation that translates the Schwoopers’ angst into visual terms, he gives us sly parodies of ’90s alt-rock posters on the walls of Avi’s boyhood bedroom, a surreal allegory where wolves run loose at a middle school, and lines like “Uh-oh, Mom’s personality is starting.” Yet Story also contains the universal, meaning-of-life-level insights that made BoJack a classic and his trippy,
underacknowledged Amazon series Undone just as enthralling. Like those shows, it is fascinated—and moved—by our subjective experiences of relationships and of time, and how the stories we tell ourselves about those things make us the people we are.
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