Long Story Short is the latest animated series from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with art by Lisa Hanawalt of Bojack and Tuca & Bertie. Despite this pedigree, it feels like it's slipped under the radar a bit, with many folks we know remarking that they didn't even know it was out. Riley and Isaiah have both watched it, and we're here to talk what we loved about it, and what hit a bit too close to home.
(Spoilers for Long Story Short follow.)
Riley: Hello, Isaiah! You and I have both finished Netflix's Long Story Short. I totally loved it, and was shocked--which sounds weird to say--by how funny it was. What did you think?
Isaiah: When I first caught wind that the creator of Bojack Horseman was back with a new animated series about a family, I was really worried it'd be another oppressively depressing watch like Bojack was. And, like, for all the wonderful writing and brutally honest things Bojack had to say about Hollywood and how stars cope or make their scandals worse, that show was a huge feel-bad watch from pillar to post. So I assumed Long Story Short would be more the same, with the added feel-bad factor of it following a family over time. Long story short on my preface here: I was surprised with how much it didn't suck to watch!
If anything, I feel I might've enjoyed the show more because it was about a tight-knit family and their problems over Hollywood bullshit.
Riley: I feel like the tide has really turned on how people feel about Bojack, and I'm not quite sure when or why that happened. Maybe because I got sober while Bojack was airing, and then Bojack the character got sober in the show's final season, but I found that show really moving and I rewatch it a lot, and I always feel a little miffy that people seem to not like it now. If anything, I found Long Story Short a bit grimmer in the way its characters are trapped in a familial cycle of hurt and bickering, with a certain kind of "no way out" vibe that I think Bojack does, eventually, find a way to free its characters from.
Isaiah: I think for me, Bojack's gap between moments of levity and everything else became so large as the series went on that it, on top of being pretty prescient with Me Too and folks wrestling with separating the art from the artist, made it feel a little too raw at times.
Yet somehow, for me, watching Long Story Short tell a non-linear tale about a family and their achievements and their attempts to foist the perpetuation of generational trauma was more a "the devil I know" kind of comedy show. The Schwooper family's whole "joke through the pain" vibe to get at deeper problems was something I felt was more relatable than the more parasocial news headlines of an actor's fall from grace.
Which is kinda funny to say that I related more to the Jewish family's generational trauma than the anthropomorphic horse's cancellation.
Riley: I think I said this to you when we were first talking about Long Story Short, but as someone raised Jewish (despite my name, lol), I was really delighted by how funny and relatable the show was. The ninth episode in particular, where mother Naomi is being honored by the JCC and her son Avi learns all these new things about her--how she's been supportive of all these people in ways he never knew, while he thinks she's been so harsh and exacting with him--is almost entirely something that happened to me with my own mom that still looms really large in my relationship with her. How loud the family is, how there's this endless stream of jokes and insults and chatter, is something my friends have remarked on when they've come to my house, and feels like every childhood get-together with the Jewish side of my family, where you leave a gathering unsure if everyone had a nice visit or was just fighting the whole time. The flipside of that dynamic, though, can be a kind of cruelty that gets painted as love because your family says it's love, which is certainly not unique to Jewish families but definitely... can be expressed in a unique way in Jewish families, maybe.
Isaiah: While I don't think it entirely pertains to the show, growing up in a Lutheran family who was a staple in our church in Cabrini Green had tons of crossover with how decorum would occasionally give way to joking relationships that were sharp jabs at festering issues under the surface between church members and my own family. I had to read between the lines and decipher those kind of battle lines of what is and isn't a touchy subject. I felt that was perfectly encompassed in the first episode with how Avi characterized his girlfriend getting berated by his mother with mean asides as a sign that she likes her. I feel like I've been both on the receiving end of that refrain and the one delivering it to my own partner. The show is really good about playing with humor to get at deeper truths and how eventually, the jokes have to get put to the side to air out grievances.
I think I related more to Avi's whole storyline by virtue of that being the stage I am in my own life, but I was enamored by how by the end of the first episode I felt I knew every character's whole deal and wanted to witness how they matured from moments that might've traumatized them and, in turn, discover what watershed moment led them to cope with issues the way they do in the show's whole Memento approach to non-linear storytelling.
Riley: I wasn't sold on the way the story is told non-chronologically at first, but it eventually really grew on me. Like you say, you get all the main beats pretty much right away, and what happened when sort of doesn't matter as much. It's a real departure from the sort of relentless linearity of Bojack, which really did a lot to make characters have to live with their actions and sit through their shit. Here, jumping in time really paints the emotional vibe of the show, and I think really captures the way family stuff can fester over the years.
Isaiah: I think too, the show's also just really funny. Oftentimes, I feel animated shows will either rely on referential humor to whatever funny thing happened in Hollywood or memes that wind up dating its jokes upon revisits. Long Story Short is a show rife with the kind of natural situational humor or observations I would stifle a laugh at in my own life. Moments like trying to save a seat for multiple people in a theater or trying to discreetly argue outside of said theater next to another group also arguing is the kind of tapped-in, evergreen humor that made shows like The Simpsons seminal. Long Story Short is filled with those moments and then some.
It's also occasionally absurdist. My favorite moments tend to be whenever the youngest son, Yoshi, is on his Todd Chavez misadventures, like a visual gag of him being in a car crash with produce trucks making a sandwich and his whole harebrained mattress-in-a-tube scheme turning into ticking timebombs.
Riley: Haha, the mattress tube episode. I was worried his character was, like, too zany given the largely grounded nature of the show, but I really came around in the intervention episode, when it turns out his big secret isn't that he's using drugs or alcohol, but that he's become Orthodox. I thought that was such a weird, lovely kind of religion deep cut, and I really liked how it played out in the finale.
I think the show does a good job, by and large, of blending that sort of zany stuff that Bojack could get away with by virtue of everyone being animals with the more grounded, realistic stuff. In some ways it could have probably just as easily been live action instead of animation, but at the same time it takes advantage of not being that to have these really nice visual gags that Hanawalt is so good at.
Isaiah: By the time I hit credits on the finale, I felt both satisfied and I wanted more. Of course, being the kind of person who'd usually write or critique a show like this, my blog brain had me wondering if there was any more story to tell knowing it'd already been renewed for a second season. But I think the show left enough room creatively to keep going for another ten episodes and did an exceptional job with instilling the feeling in me as a viewer to want the show to keep going. It feels almost JoJo's-esque with how they've already established the next generation in the Schwooper family. It'll be interesting to see cycles get broken and how they'll handle not making new problematic spokes for their young'uns to dismantle.
Riley: I did feel at the end that it both was and wasn't finished-- it might have been the nature of my watching it in a few big chunks for prospective blog purposes, but it did start to feel a little bit like it was circling the same problems, and I worry that while the story didn't feel resolved at the end, more show will just start to feel oppressive the way you highlight Bojack as feeling. I would be happy if it was just done, but since it's not, I hope they find some new material to mine within that format.
Isaiah: That's fair. I spaced out my viewing on a Saturday between getting groceries and doing other odd things, so I kind of gave myself some time to ruminate on things that happened in episodic chunks before circling back to it. Maybe that influenced how I felt walking away from the show more glowingly than letting Netflix's whole binge-watch model make it feel like having "the -itis" from a hearty Thanksgiving feast. I do hope that what I felt got resolved won't become a retread for future seasons, but in a way, that's families to a T, so I'll give a wide birth to the show should that be some big-brained point of the whole series.
Riley: I'll be honest that it's tough for me to watch shows about families, especially when they feature older parents. My own parents are quite up there in years, and our relationship has always been... well gosh, it's hard to say. It was definitely "bad" in the traditional sense when I first came out as trans, and over the years it's changed in this way where I'll sometimes say "yeah, we get along well now" and then my friends will remind me that my mom still uses the wrong name and pronoun for me 20+ years since my coming out and I'm like, "right, gosh, is this good?" In that way, a lot of the kids' relationship with Naomi really resonated with me, again this kind of "I can be as cruel as I want because I love you, and I love you because I say I do" thing.
But we see the kids also really wrangle with, what kind of mom was their mom and what kind of family did they have? And I think it's something we all have to wrestle with as our parents get old. Like I think a lot about how one day--not soon, hopefully, but soon--my relationship with my folks will be the whole of it, and anything we don't resolve will just never be resolved, and have I been my best self and what do I need to do to feel good about that inevitable ending, and... ah. It's a lot, and Long Story Short really dug a lot of that stuff up for me.
Isaiah: I feel that on the family front. While me and my mom are on all accounts good in the kind of parent-child relationship where we're both the quiet ones in our otherwise loud family, seeing Avi go a bit overboard with calling out his mom for her bullshit made me remember a time when I told my mom that I couldn't forgive her for a well-meaning wellness call gone awry during covid. The whole waking up to police outside my door to take me to the hospital, not giving me enough time to splash water on my face and hours in the ER with folks who were legit sick was something my Buddha-like patience couldn't excuse, so I related to Avi's crash out at his mom for the harm she caused. I think the whole "I love you say it back" deal with Naomi and her kids and grandkids highlighted that that love isn't the kind of assured thing that lets you get away with how someone makes their loved ones feel, even if its well intentioned.
Riley: The show is really good at interrogating what love and care really are, in a way I think Bojack was too--not cutting away from relationships at the most dramatic moments but instead really sitting with them and their aftermaths. I think making the show animated definitely keeps it from being too much, though I am also a big fan of adult animation, whereas I know some folks aren't.
Isaiah: For sure. The show's whole aesthetic definitely helps make its more contentious moments more palatable. Just another reason why I champion animated shows being the shit, and Long Story Short is no exception.
