“A Long Story Short,” premiering Friday on Netflix, is a sweet, melancholic, satirical, silly, healing, hopeful, sometimes sly cartoonish tale of a middle-class Jewish family, told non-chronologically from 1990 to 2020. For all the exaggerations and overt depictions of over-the-top behavior — it’s an extremely timely and surprisingly moving take on relationships between parents and children and siblings, and the passage of time and life itself. The eight-episode season centers on a funeral.
On a plane ride, Avi Schwooper (Ben Feldman), his last name a combination of his parents Schwartz and Cooper, plays the new girlfriend of Jen (Angelique Cabral) in Paul Simon’s record “Obvious Child,” in which the character transitions from a baby to a married man in a poem. “It’s about time, isn’t it?” he says, setting the theme and strategy. In the following episodes, we’ll see relationships begin and end; children born and raised, not always in that order. Things change, things fall apart, things last.
Created by “BoJack Horseman” creator Rafael Bob-Waksberg—Avi is drawn to resemble him—and designed by Liz Hanawalt (who inspired and designed the “BoJack” characters and created “Tuca & Bertie”), it has the look of a children’s book, bright, colorful, and busy, aggressive. Deceptively sophisticated and wonderfully expressive, it’s full of living detail without being too lifelike.
Avi’s parents are Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), intense and serious, and Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), light-hearted and humorous. Avi, who writes about music, will go on to marry Jen (blonde, Gentile); Hannah (Michaela Dietz) is their smart, socially isolated daughter. Avi’s sister Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the angry middle child, will start a family with Kendra (Nicole Byer), a black woman who is Jewish by choice. Younger brother Yoshi (Max Greenfield) is a bit of a lost soul — “Sometimes I just feel like an extra,” he’ll say — diagnosed as a teenager with ADD, dyslexia, and executive function disorders. (“I never paid him enough attention,” Naomi says, rushing to claim blame. “Now he’s in deficit.”)
Created by Rafael Bob-Waksberg and designed by Lisa Hanawalt, the series features children’s books that are bright, colorful, and busy, aggressively two-dimensional, with a look of wobbly bold lines and square patterns.
(Netflix)
Although each episode is a piece in a puzzle, each one has its own story: Yoshi sells mattresses that come in a tube; AVI gets mixed up with self-righteous parents when he campaigns to remove wolves from Hannah’s school (the wolves, by contrast, are made real); Kendra at work at a birthday arcade called BJ Barnacles; Yoshi on a night out in San Francisco—the show is set around the Bay Area—with her sister’s ex-boyfriend trying to recover a lost bag; Shira tries to make her mother’s knives; an impromptu Shabbat at a desert motel. There are inside family jokes (“not a schneek,” Cousin Moishe) that pay off after a while; a school holiday competition (“Hanukah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa/We tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas,” a song plays in the background). Yoshi has a bar mitzvah; Naomi is honored for her charity work. The occasional weird invention has been folded: a “hambulance” that delivers ham; food trucks that sell potato ice cream and soup on a stick; something called decoy shirt syndrome, caused by a dropped decoy rubbing against shorts.
While I suspect this topic is only interesting to (us) Jews, it took a long time for any kind of Jewish specificity to make it onto the screen, especially considering who created the movie business. (Assimilation was the name of the game for people scapegoating for race.) Even now, it doesn’t happen that much. You could feel it on “Seinfeld,” see it a lot on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The current Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants It,” starring Kristen Bell in a relationship with Adam Brody’s rabbi, and the recent Adam Sandler-produced “You’re So Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.” And there’s the odd Holocaust drama.
But at this point, with its vague mix of classic anti-Semitism, fake anti-anti-Semitism being weaponized against universities, and what is called anti-Semitism only because it is critical of Israel, it’s not a bad thing to get a relatively straightforward look at a modern American Jewish family. Together, the characters represent a spectrum of religious attitudes — from atheist to convert, selective to very observant — but all are embedded in the culture.
Hannah, whose Gentile mother tells her to “not be Jewish,” wonders if her desire for a bat mitzvah might be “cultural appropriation.”
“Look, if Adolf Hitler saw you, I don’t think he would technically do the math on how Jewish you are halachically,” her father says. “He would throw us in the oven with the rest of us. … If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler, you’re Jewish enough for me.”
That the show can be a little vague at times — I had to look up “Moshiach ” to get one joke — only deepens its world. But anyone who’s ever shared a family joke, or wanted to ask a question about someone who’s no longer around to answer, or compared notes with a sibling over a parent who’s never fully understood, will recognize themselves.
