One of my favorite performances in TV history is Daniel Stern’s in The Wonder Years. If you’re not familiar, The Wonder Years was a single-camera coming-of-age sitcom that aired on ABC from 1988 to 1993. The show’s hero, Kevin Arnold—the youngest son of a white, middle-class, suburban family in the late 1960s and early 1970s—was played by the child actor Fred Savage. Stern, who never appears on camera, narrated the entire series as the adult Kevin, presumably telling the story of his childhood from the perspective of the late-twentieth century present. His voiceover sets a nostalgic tone, but it also creates the show’s signature structure. The Wonder Years isn’t a period piece so much as a show about, and constructed from, memories. Grown-up Kevin tells the story of his adolescence, its romances and tragedies, while at the same time, through the tone and timbre of his voice, telling a story about the man he is now. It’s at once a straightforward narrative device and a deceptively complex mode of address for a broadcast sitcom.
And all of that rests on Stern. His voice is kind, even-keeled, broken-in. Many of the show’s laughs come from the counterpoint it offers to young Savage’s hair-trigger physical performance. Here is a boy in crisis; here is a man, resolved. Here is the tumult of youth; here is the calm void of middle-age. The specifics of Kevin’s future remain a mystery for much of the series, but who he will become is never in doubt. Stern’s is the voice of a modern parent, possessed of a softness, a pliability, a reflectiveness that we know did not belong to Kevin’s own father (a complicated ogre played by Dan Lauria). Stern’s narration is a special effect that somehow vouchsafes the show’s ultimate realism. It’s all true because we believe him. It all works because he tells us it does.
There’s no voiceover narration in Long Story Short, the new animated coming-of-age comedy from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Nor is there any settled sense of safety, a voice reassuring us everything turns out OK. And while the show’s opening credits sequence, filled with photo-album spreads of suburban youth, nods to the Way We Were aesthetic of The Wonder Years, Long Story Short is a far more tart and untidy work of memory. Don Draper famously told us, on Mad Men, that nostalgia means “the pain from an old wound.” Part of the wonder of Daniel Stern’s performance is how he makes that pain quietly available as a gentle undertone to the show’s broader atmosphere of warmth and fuzziness. Long Story Short—which is sentimental, open-hearted, and hilarious but never quite warm and fuzzy—puts the pain front and center, whipping us around and around through time, like a carousel of old wounds.
Long Story Short follows a middle-class Jewish family, the Schwoopers, from the 1980s to the present, jumping around from year to year, slowly accumulating the story of this family and their significant others in aggregate. Avi (Ben Feldman), our quasi-protagonist, grows from a rascally child to a charming music nerd of a teen to a selfish shit of a thirtysomething to a miserable middle-aged divorcee. Middle sister Shira (Abbi Jacobson) suffers young heartbreak after heartbreak, and eventually finds love, but only by getting as far outside the family as she can. And lost, loser youngest sibling Yoshi (Max Greenfield) wanders aimlessly through life until he is, eventually, found in an unexpected place.
Most of the show’s shambling throughlines involve the siblings’ varied relationships with their mother, the imposing and impossible Naomi (Lisa Edelstein). Beloved Avi resents his mom’s smothering affection but struggles to fully rebel, Shira yearns for approval only to be denied at every turn, and Yoshi’s failure to launch makes him a constant disappointment. To the show’s credit—as well as to Edelstein’s, who delivers a bravura tragicomic voice performance—Naomi only ever plays with the stereotype of the domineering Jewish matriarch. The character never truly succumbs to that caricature. Her children repeatedly cast her as the villain of their stories—as might lesser writers—but, as episodes roll on, it becomes clear that Naomi is the show’s big, bitter, beating heart.
Part of Long Story Short’s genius lies in its generosity toward often ungenerous characters. It shows us their (often extremely funny) indictments of each other without ever really committing to them. And this is largely possible because the series is absent the kind of organizing narrative voice that gave The Wonder Years its structure, its tone, and its argument. Instead, the show takes its organization from the messy machinations of memory.
The flow of time on Long Story Short is defiantly, even mischievously, nonlinear. Every episode jumps around to at least two different time periods—denoted by big intertitles naming the year—and most jump between several. Sometimes this works conventionally: A standout standalone episode focused on Shira Schwooper’s eventual wife Kendra (Nicole Byer), for instance, begins with a flashback to a formative childhood moment and then flashes forward to her early days in the workforce, consciously and unconsciously processing that moment in a bunch of pointed ways. But other episodes move more associatively. If The Wonder Years is essentially one big, long, linear, serialized flashback, then its structure echoes that of a fond reminiscence. Long Story Short’s clipped, frenetic, vexed shuffling feels, in comparison, more like the rapid-fire, cringe-inducing mental slideshow of shame and regret that sometimes keeps you awake at night in bed. Not: Ah, remember when? But rather: Oh my god, I can’t believe I did that, can they ever forgive me?
That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a laugh-out-loud comedy, but, in the hands of Bob-Waksberg—creator of the world’s first clinically depressed anthropomorphic horse—it is.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg, quietly, has one of the highest creative hit rates of any TV writer-producer of the past ten years. BoJack Horseman, the debut Netflix series he created in 2014, is rightly remembered as a comic masterpiece, an astringently perceptive adaptation and critique of the antihero dramas that had dominated TV since the turn of the century. But he also executive-produced two dramatically under-sung animated series in that period: Tuca and Bertie, which was created by BoJack production designer and brilliant comics artist Lisa Hanawalt, and Undone, an incredible rotoscoped experiment that he co-created with BoJack writer Kate Purdy. You should seek out both if you haven’t—they’re two of the many lost delights of Peak TV.
Long Story Short, which has already been renewed for a second season at Netflix, is his highest-profile project since the end of BoJack, and, while it shares many of the elements that fans of that show came to love, it is a very different, no less ingenious, animal. Hanawalt is back as production designer, so, while all of its characters are human people and not anthropomorphized fauna, the aesthetic is recognizable. The show is likewise not as reliant on an intricately woven tapestry of sight gags as BoJack was. Bob-Waksberg still has that arrow in his quiver, however, and the slower pace of those jokes on Long Story Short almost emphasizes their craftsmanship. (I snorted pretty loudly when a character behind the wheel of a ham-delivery truck gets into a five-car pile-up with two bread trucks, a lettuce truck, and a tomato truck before getting on the phone and saying, “Mom, it happened again.”)
But the biggest difference isn’t necessarily aesthetic so much as generic. While both BoJack and Long Story Short are nominally comedies, BoJack’s real subject was the antihero. Bob-Waksberg’s ambitious project was to take this recent, dominant television archetype and try to imagine a reparative narrative for him. Rather than following its protagonist down and down and down until the show cuts to black, BoJack engineered its titular horseman’s journey to the bottom, only to also engineer his way back out. What if a (horse)person could be better just by trying? What if there were narratives available other than Decline and Fall? BoJack Horseman’s special talent was its ability to be as optimistic as it was bleak.
While Long Story Short is not interested in the antihero, it is interested in the family. And Bob-Waksberg approaches his new subject with the same withering hopefulness he brought to BoJack. The show’s scattered temporality allows a kind of archaeology of regret and resentment. There’s a massive scale to the small-potatoes slights that we watch develop over decades. Avi’s girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) brings Naomi the gift of an empty vase at their first meeting, and Naomi, inexplicably insulted by this, holds it against her for her entire life. A brief, weed-induced paranoid freakout at his bar mitzvah haunts Yoshi like a ghost into his thirties. The fleeting seconds when nobody notices that Shira nearly drowns at the beach as a small child irrevocably alter her relationship with her mother and brother for all time. There’s a scene in the show’s finale that unexpectedly reveals the deep, traumatic history of a playful running gag that was so gutting I clutched my chest when it happened. I felt like I got run over by the ham truck.
The classic family sitcom is as much about form as it is about content. It’s a living room and a kitchen; a set of familiar, low-stakes domestic dramas; a situation that resets itself every episode. Long Story Short is a family sitcom as epic. Its dramas can’t be contained by the comforting structures of the genre, the reassurance of a good voiceover. Classic family sitcoms like Full House offer neat narrative closure; ironized single-cam sitcoms like Modern Family offer tight episodic buttons; even auteurish family sadcoms like Better Things offer poetic ellipses to their vignettes. Long Story Short incorporates all of those modes, but its project is both more ordinary and wilder. What if the sitcom beats that have helped us imaginatively construct the nuclear family since they first debuted in the 1950s can also be used to imaginatively disassemble that family? At the end of the pilot to The Wonder Years, Daniel Stern remembers the suburbs of Kevin’s youth, and narrates, “We know that inside each one of those identical boxes … there were people with stories, there were families bound together in the pain and the struggle of love.” That’s what Long Story Short—one of the best shows of the year, and easily one of the best family sitcoms I’ve seen in years—is about, too. Goes without saying.
