Long Story Short Review: BoJack Horseman Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg Swings Big and Connects

Nestled within the closing credits of each episode of Long Story Short is a message that reads: "This program was made by humans." 

This is, technically, a clarification, a pretty pointed diss of AI, and a disclaimer that I would love to see in the credits of every production still committed to the idea that real people should be employed to create art. But it's also a statement of fact that you can feel in every second of Netflix's Long Story Short, a temporally sweeping animated family saga created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the same showrunner responsible for the extraordinary BoJack Horseman. The point of Long Story Short is to depict, through the prism of one multigenerational family, nothing less than the breadth of human experience: the raising of children, the evolving relationships with siblings, the struggles with spirituality, the decisions to build and unravel marriages, and the trauma we unwittingly inflict on the people we love the most. To put it in reductive, elevator pitch terms: It's BoJack mashed up with This Is Us, except much funnier, less corny, and way more Jewish than This Is Us. Also, spoiler alert: No one dies in a Crock-Pot fire.

In a departure from BoJack Horseman and Tuca & Bertie, another entry in the Bob-Waksberg multiverse that was created by Lisa Hanawalt, the production designer for BoJack and Long Story Short, this series is not populated with anthropomorphized animals who have names like Mr. Peanutbutter or Aunt Tallulah Toucan. The members of the Schwooper clan, a portmanteau of the last names of matriarch Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and patriarch Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), are recognizably flawed individuals whose existences unfold in a cartoon version of reality that pretty closely resembles the actual thing. While there are some flights of fancy and hyperrealistically funny moments — take much of Episode 4, in which the youngest Schwooper, Yoshi (Max Greenfield), invests in a mattress-in-a-tube business that inevitably leads to an extended series of mattress explosions — Long Story Short is mainly a show about neurotic people just trying to do their best to get through this thing called life. No matter how much our corporate overlords may insist otherwise, only observant, imaginative, flesh-and-blood mortals can make a comedy about the human experience that is this funny and poignant.

Long Story Short is also ambitious, though in a less obvious way than BoJack Horseman. There are no episodes set entirely at underwater film festivals nor any that burrow into the nonlinear minds of dementia patients. This series takes its biggest risk with structure. Each episode hops to specific points in time and adopts different characters' points of view, sometimes of the same events. By flashing as far back as 1959 and as close to the present as 2022, with numerous stops in between, Bob-Waksberg and his colleagues tell a story that is both epic and filled with carefully considered, revealing details about this family unit that build upon each other like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle-in-progress. It's a macro piece of work, fueled by its attention to the micro. To achieve that combination in just ten 25-minute episodes, and to do it in a way that looks effortless even though it clearly was not, makes this one of the best TV shows of 2025. (Netflix has already renewed it for a second season.)

9.0

Long Story Short

at Netflix

Like

• Beautifully rendered animation
• Funny and moving in equal measure

Dislike

• It arguably takes a couple of episodes to settle into the Long Story Short vibe. But maybe I'm just being a noodge.

It is also the most Jewish mainstream comedy to air or stream since Transparent ended its run in 2019. Not only does Long Story Short dissect the dynamics in a family that is explicitly Jewish (the very first episode is about a bar mitzvah), its comedic sensibility is distinctly Jewish, too. The jokes are often dark, existential, occasionally punctuated by Yiddish and steeped in gallows humor. 

Naomi (voiced by Edelstein with a self-involved but nuanced edge) is a classic overly critical Jewish mother; prior to a family gathering, she tells her daughter, Shira (Abbi Jacobson), that she looks like "a panhandler with clown hair." To her credit, she prefaces the comment with, "Don't take this the wrong way." ("What is the right way to take that?" Shira asks.) In a rarity for television, the writers also reckon with the way each of the Schwooper kids defines their Jewish identity, and how that identity evolves (or doesn't) over time. 

Long Story Short's exploration of Judaism sidesteps the political, though. The Holocaust comes up a few times — how could it not? — but the word Israel is never spoken. At a moment when antisemitism is on the rise and many Jews feel sad and angry over the ongoing conflict in Gaza, showing us a Jewish family whose Jewish-ness is not defined by Israel feels a little daring and definitely important. It's just as significant that Shira's wife, Kendra, voiced by Nicole Byer, is a Black woman who discovers and commits to Judaism as an adult. Being Jewish in Bob-Waksberg's world exists on a whole wide spectrum, just as it does in the world-world.

While Long Story Short doesn't traffic in satire of contemporary culture the way BoJack did, setting its later years in the post-Covid era offers opportunities to comment on the madness of modern times. The sixth episode, which largely takes place in 2021 when students have just returned to in-person learning, finds eldest sibling Avi (Ben Feldman) inadvertently being embraced by a group of anti-vax, conspiracy-minded parents who mistakenly assume he must be like them because he wants administrators to remove a small pack of wolves that moved into the school during lockdown. One deranged dad complains that he's not permitted to come to school to apply his daughter's sunscreen every day, while a mom expresses concern that no one will swap out the fluorescent lights in the building. "Now my kid has Bono eyes!" she cries.

During a holiday dance recital in another episode, Avi is reprimanded by an usher for loudly arguing with his sister during a conversation about sperm donation. "In the spirit of the holidays, please stop shouting about your ejaculate," the usher says. There are multiple laugh-out-loud lines like that in every episode.

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The hand-drawn animation is textured, understated, and sometimes even moving. When Shira pictures a future for her two sons at a seemingly idyllic Jewish school, the imagery of her boys makes it look as though they are dashing through the pages of various picture books, a journey that ends when they, now fully grown men, receive Nobel Prizes for Emotional Regulation and Confidence. In a lovely close-up of Shira watching her brother watch his daughter perform in that aforementioned holiday recital, the predominant hues in the frame are lavender and rose, a reflection of the colored filters through which we sometimes see our children, or we see someone else experiencing emotions we desperately want to have ourselves.

It's a small, universal moment that rises to something profound. Long Story Short is filled with them. It's not just a program that was made by humans. It's a program that reminds us why family and the accumulation of shared memories and humanity itself matter. 

Premieres: Friday, Aug. 22 on Netflix
Who's in it: Ben Feldman, Abbi Jacobson, Max Greenfield, Lisa Edelstein, Paul Reiser, Nicole Byer, Angelique Cabral, Dave Franco, Michaela Dietz
Who's behind it: Raphael Bob-Waksberg
For fans of: BoJack Horseman
Episodes watched: 10 of 10