Stream It Or Skip It?

Raphael Bob-Waksberg‘s acclaimed series BoJack Horseman was known as much for its emotional resonance as it was for its comedy. In fact, its best moments were when BoJack was dealing with his emotional trauma. In his new series, Bob-Waksberg turns to the emotional trauma of growing up, shown in the form of a Jewish family from California and three siblings that love each other and can’t stand each other, often at the same time.

Opening Shot: “1996.” Cars going over a bridge. The Schwartz-Cooper family — The Schwoopers — are trying to follow the hearse from a funeral to the cemetery.

The Gist: The funeral is for the mother of Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), and she’s anxious as her husband, Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser) tries to find the hearse to follow. Naomi also hates that the rabbi gave a generic eulogy. In the back are the Schwooper kids — their parents combined their last names for the children. The oldest, Avi (Ben Feldman), thought it was a nice service; middle child Shira (Abbi Jacobson) is being annoyed by her little brother Yoshi (Max Greenfield), who can’t seem to sit still in his booster seat. When Avi says “at least she’s with grandpa now,” his mother caustically reminds him that Jews don’t believe in Heaven. As much as his dad tries to explain that in less nihilistic terms, that doesn’t make Avi feel any better.

Cut to 2004. Adult Avi is on a plane with his new girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral), trying to explain to her the the significance of the lyrics to Paul Simon’s song “The Obvious Child.” They’re on their way to California for Yoshi’s bar mitzvah, and Jen is meeting Avi’s family for the first time. The way he figures, his mom will be so busy with the Friday night dinner for visitors and the reception on Saturday, she won’t have time to laser focus on Jen’s perceived flaws.

He underestimates Naomi’s ability to multitask; while making the food for the Shabbat dinner, she manages to shrug off the vase that Jen got her, repeatedly call her “Jennifer” instead of “Jen,” and get upset that Jen washed the dairy plates with the sponge used for meat plates (the family keeps Kosher). Through all of this, though, Naomi still bends over backwards to make Jen feel welcome, even to the point of mentioning her during the Friday night toast. Yoshi is off to the side, eating cookies before dinner and not wanting to talk.

At the reception the next day, Yoshi is with his buddy Danny Wegbriet (Dave Franco) in the coat room, smoking weed. When Danny questions the existence of God, it makes Yoshi spiral that all the work he did to prepare to read his haftorah was for nothing. He’s dragged out by Avi to light the 13 candles, and for some reason Naomi gives one of the candles, usually reserved for close friends and family, to Jen, much to the objection of Uncle Barry (Danny Burstein).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Long Story Short was created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who created BoJack Horseman. The animation style feels like the more sedate parts of Tuca & Bertie, which makes sense; Lisa Hanawalt, T&B‘s creator, created the artistic style for this series. In many ways, it feels like an animated version of the one-year Freevee series Dinner With The Parents or the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs.

Our Take: The idea behind Long Story Short is that Bob-Waksberg is going to go back and forth in the lives of the Schwooper siblings, where we see them fight, get along, develop sibling inside-joke language, and go through all the stages of life.

In the second episode, for instance, Shira and her girlfriend Kendra Hooper (Nicole Byer) travel from Oakland to Santa Rosa to go to the holiday dance recital of Avi and Jen’s daughter Hannah (Michaela Dietz), mostly to ask Avi if he can donate sperm to their effort to have a child. That episode not only brings up an incident that happened at the Jersey Shore way back in 1991, but also Avi’s discomfort with all the restrictive rules that came with being brought up in an observant Jewish family, as well as the fact that he doesn’t “check in” with his siblings or parents as much as he should. In the meantime, Kendra has to save a row of seats and hates the attention the guilty white liberals in the audience give to her because she’s Black.

It’s a funny and poignant story about dysfunctional but loving families in general, but it definitely hits home for viewers like us, who grew up Jewish in a similar family dynamic, albeit a couple of decades before the Schwoopers did. Naomi and Elliot are likely conservative-to-reformed Jews who are highly observant, but none of their kids have followed suit. Avi and Shira are in relationships with non-Jews, and we’re not quite sure what’s going on with the adult version of Yoshi as yet. All of them have rejected their upbringing in some way, but all retain that center of gravity that is their family, even if that involves a lot of loud, fast talk-arguing that hops from topic to topic.

Even in its sillier moments, like when Avi keeps yelling about his sperm in the middle of the recital, the show rings true because we have participated in family discussions where it seemed like we had no clue about our surroundings or who might be listening in.

We like the time-jumping aspect of the show, mainly because incidents from the past resonate in future years, like the Jersey Shore incident did with Shira. But it also shows how the relationships between the Schwoopers, their parents and each other have evolved and how they’ve stayed the same over the decades. It’s much easier to notice those trends when two incidents in two different eras are smashed together for comparison, and Bob-Waksberg does a good job of doing that without giving the viewers whiplash.

Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes.

Parting Shot: “2022.” As “The Obvious Child” plays, we see a bald Avi sitting in his car, looking wistful.

Sleeper Star: Cabral’s Jen and Byer’s Kendra play important roles as the outsiders who have been invited into the Schwooper family madness and have had to adjust.

Most Pilot-y Line: At the bar mitzvah, Shira bemoans the fact that her former best friend Baby didn’t show up. “Why do you even care? You haven’t talked to Baby in over a year,” to which Shira replies, “Well, the Holocaust happened 60 years ago. I guess we should stop caring about that, too.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Long Story Short is a warm family comedy that will hit home to some degree to anyone who has a loving but complicated relationship with their families.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.