Long Story Short review: A funny, dark and lovingly Jewish homage to family ★★★★★ - The Jewish Chronicle

It’s 2004, and the Schwooper family is celebrating their youngest child Yoshi’s bar mitzvah with a big party. Yoshi, meanwhile, is in the coatroom smoking a joint and questioning the existence of God.

This moment during the first episode of Long Story Short, the latest adult animated TV series from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, is but one of the show’s countless moments that are so Jewish, so familiar, and so wincingly uncomfortable you can’t help blushing.

Long Story Short chronicles the lives of the Schwoopers – mum Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), dad Elliot (Paul Reiser), and kids Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) – over the course of several decades, with episodes that jump between the early 90s to the 2020s and back again. The nonlinear timeline works well in an animated format – illustrated by Lisa Hanawalt, with whom Bob-Waksberg also collaborated on BoJack – and audiences get the sense of having known the Schwooper family far longer than most 10-episode series arcs allow.

Long Story Short (L to R) Abbi Jacobson as Shira Schwooper, Lisa Edelstein as Naomi Schwartz, Paul Reiser as Elliot Cooper and Max Greenfield as Yoshi Schwooper in Long Story Short. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025COURTESY OF NETFLIX

And know them, we do, especially as Jews. The Schwoopers are argumentative and slightly dysfunctional in that singularly Jewish way, and Naomi wields the passive-aggressive “I guess I’m a terrible mom” line against her ungrateful children as reliably as any guilting Jewish mother would. She is both overbearingly affectionate and hypercritical – again, relatable – and we’re able to see the effect of such parenting thanks to time leaps that show Avi, Shira and Yoshi as adults.

“I think you love him too much to see reality,” Naomi tells Elliot when Yoshi, aged 22, decides to embark on an ill-fated business venture involving mattresses in tubes. “I love him the right amount, so I see his flaws,” comes the riposte.

I knew Long Story Short would, at the very least, be beautifully written story, because Bob-Waksberg is such safe pair of hands; BoJack Horseman was, at first glance, an audacious comedy about a humanoid horse, but through excellent writing became a profound representation of addiction, friendship.

Long Story Short is every bit as heartfelt, funny and dark as BoJack, but writing about something closer to home – a Jewish family – means Bob-Waksburg’s singular voice manages to shine even brighter.

Long Story Short (L to R) Lisa Edelstein as Naomi Schwartz, Angelique Cabral as Jen and Abbi Jacobson as Shira Schwooper in Long Story Short. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

Expect very Jewish family jokes, every Yiddish word under the sun (ferkakte, farshtunken, meshugana, etc), Magen David necklaces, a Babka Streisand Bakery, whimsical double-barreled names and more diverse depictions of Jewish identity than any live-action show about Jews has ever featured.

Shira’s wife Kendra, who is black, comes to Judaism by conversion after an accidental visit to a shul provides a sense of peace she couldn’t find anywhere else. Avi, in adulthood, chafes against the unresolved pains of his traditional Jewish upbringing and attempts to keep his daughter Hannah away from the faith altogether. Bob-Waksberg presents myriad ways in which people approach and recede from their Jewishness, begging the question of how those choices impact not only their understandings of themselves, but the future identities of their children.

Shira and Avi also come to represent the way relationships with siblings can become like time machines to the past as they remind each other of old family jokes, kibbitz about their parents’ neuroses, and reminisce about oft-forgotten family gatherings.

It’s one of the many sweet ways in which Long Story Short pays homage to the passage of time, reminding us just how quickly we go from children to adults, adults to parents – and how our Jewishness stays with us all along the way.

Long Story Short is now streaming on Netflix.

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Netflix