Parents' Guide to Long Story Short

Brilliantly written with a great cast and powerful emotional resonance, this animated outing from the creator of BoJack Horseman is a wow. There are so many good things about this show that it's hard to pick one as best, but let's start with the unconventional narrative structure, which skips back and forth through time: We attend Yoshi's bar mitzvah in 2004, and then we blip over to 2014, when Shira and her wife, Kendra (Nicole Byer), awkwardly approach Avi for a sperm donation. Then it's to 2021, when Shira tries to buy her twins' way into a good school by making the world's best knishes. In between, we sometimes see small vignettes of another time, which can hit the viewer like a gut punch, such as in the first episode, when Long Story Short cuts from Avi and his girlfriend Jen blissfully in love to an older, balder Avi, now divorced, sitting in his car alone and full of regrets. We see simmering family resentments and absorb family jokes, and then we flash back and understand how these came to be. It's a potentially gimmicky setup, realized in a beautiful way.

That storytelling is equally apt in Long Story Short's writing, which is funny in that the humor emerges from the characters themselves, rather than encouraging the audience to laugh at them. A lot of the humor also revolves around the characters' joyous, sharply observed Jewishness that's threaded throughout the show. Characters are so sensitively drawn that viewers will quickly fall for them, and root for them. Long Story Short has the potential to reach the heights of creator Raphael Matthew Bob-Waksberg's best-known show (and Netflix's most iconic animated series), BoJack Horseman. Fans, rejoice!