Few shows in recent memory have boasted the hidden depths of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s BoJack Horseman. Conceived and marketed as a surreal stoner comedy about the madcap adventures of a delusional washed-up half-human, half-horse former sitcom star, BoJack quickly burned off its premise and unfurled into something quite wonderful.
Little by little, the jokes started to disappear. The central character stopped being a punchbag and became a case study of depression and loneliness. At times, the focus on trauma was overwhelming – witness The View From Halfway Down episode, in which BoJack is haunted by figures from his past while his brain starves of oxygen as he drowns in a pool – but the series was ambitious enough to single out Bob-Waksberg as a generational talent.
It stands to reason that his new series, Long Story Short, should give us several generations at once. The show is the tale of the Schwoopers, an unexceptional Jewish family, told at various points between 1959 and 2022. Chronologically, episodes shuffle the deck – one might start in the 1990s and end this decade, or vice versa – which means that all the characters are in a constant state of flux. There is no fixed point to them. They are all transitional figures, growing and learning from various levels of experience.
In essence, this makes Long Story Short the anti-Simpsons. The Simpsons is trapped in the perpetual now, with the characters still the same age as they were in the 1990s. Long Story Short, though, cannot sit still, barely managing to stay in the same year for 15 minutes at a time. Characters we see as children grow old, have kids, lose their hair, get divorced; their carefree youth gives way to the regret-filled trudge of middle age.
Which sounds heavier than it is. Because, on a minute-by-minute basis, Long Story Short is fantastically funny. Episodes rip along in a flurry of one-liners and sitcom tropes – there is a chaotic barmitzvah, a harebrained business enterprise, a fertility mix-up – that land almost without fail. There is even a scattering of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual gags, such as when a young mother daydreams that her children will grow up to win the Nobel prize for emotional regulation.
The magic trick is the slow build of melancholy that gradually amasses beneath all this. Bob-Waksberg has claimed that the show deals with “small-t” trauma. There is nothing (at least for now) that plumbs the operatic darkness of BoJack Horseman, but we are still given enough to learn why all these imperfect people are the way they are. Usually the root cause tends to be a well-intentioned but emotionally ill-equipped parent, because some things never change.
The parent in question here is more often than not Naomi, played spectacularly by Lisa Edelstein. Long Story Short has an incredible cast – Ben Feldman, Abbi Jacobson, Paul Reiser, Max Greenfield – but Edelstein is given the most amount of scenery to chew. An overbearing matriarch prone to assaulting everyone around her with a suffocating mix of affection, dismissal and passive-aggression, Naomi is the closest this show comes to being two-dimensional.
Had the series been set at one fixed point in time – perhaps as we meet her in episode one, belittling her son’s new girlfriend for not grasping the finer points of a Jewish household – that accusation would probably stand. But before long we have been bounced back in time and introduced to her mother, at which point you can’t help but sympathise with her. Again and again, the show reminds us that everything is an echo of what came before.
This is a testament to Bob-Waksberg’s writing. This level of granular, non-linear character development must have been a feat to construct, and yet it feels effortless. These seem like snapshots from a real life that has already been lived. Every progression rings true. Every new turn feels earned. You hesitate to wonder precisely the level of autobiography he is pulling from, and whether any of his family is still talking to him.
Theoretically, a show as funny and clever as this could run for ever. That said, shows like this have a habit of running out of steam faster than usual. Dan Fogelman’s This Is Us, which similarly told a non-chronological family story, quickly found itself hamstrung by a lack of material; all the juicy plots were eaten up quickly, leaving the series to sustain itself on increasingly mediocre memories until it fizzled out.
It would be a disservice to the pure enjoyment of these opening episodes if the Schwoopers were forced to exist on similar scraps down the line. Hopefully, that won’t happen. I have lived with this family for six decades now, and I’m still greedy for more.
• Long Story Short is on Netflix now.
