Maybe the most interesting character is Naomi, who comes off initially as a stereotype — the doting, guilt-tripping, hyperdramatic Jewish mom. Preparing for Yoshi’s bar mitzvah, she bemoans the loss of her baby boy to manhood. “The last of my children is no longer a child,” she declares. “I am childless!”
But over the episodes, she reveals a toughness, complexity and sardonic turn of mind (enhanced by Edelstein’s impeccable line readings). In a late episode, the Schwooper children attend a function honoring her public service, where they learn that she had an empathy and a patience they never saw as her children. It’s a striking example of a universal phenomenon rarely depicted on family TV shows: the moment you learn that your parents are people, distinct individuals with rich lives outside of yours.
I don’t, however, want to make “Long Story Short” sound like a barrel of schmaltz. It’s wildly funny, swinging, like “Bojack,” from deep emotion to loony tune slapstick. (This is the kind of show in which, if a ham-delivery vehicle gets in an accident, it will be sandwiched into a multivehicle pileup that also includes a lettuce truck, a tomato truck and two bread trucks.) And like “Bojack,” it often uses one in the service of the other. This is a show full of big life moments, including more than one funeral, and funerals teach us that there is no laugh sweeter than the cathartic one that comes at an inappropriate time.
But where the comedy and drama of “Bojack” were rooted in surrealism — it was set in a Hollywood populated by anthropomorphized animals — “Long Story Short” is meticulously realistic and specific, especially as regards its characters’ Jewishness. This can be tricky; as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Nobody Wants This” have showed, cultural specificity can easily tip over into caricature.
Here, the religious deep cuts and Yiddishisms serve a theme: The tension between belonging to a tribe, be that a family or a religion, and remaining an individual. In the view of “Long Story Short,” at least, there are many ways of belonging. You can be devout or unbelieving, born-in or converted, you can embrace tradition or eschew it — but you’re still mishpocheh, a member of the clan, you still own a part in a story that repeats through time.
Time is the great subject of this series. Time moves too fast, which is the subject of two works of Jewish songwriters — “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof” and Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child” — referred to in the first episode. And time never goes anywhere, because every moment of the past is always present.
The series’ nonlinear narrative makes both points at once; on the one hand, time is a flat circle, always repeating, and on the other hand, you blink and suddenly decades have passed. In its sweet, astute way, “Long Story Short” is a kind of retelling of the ancient Catskills joke that opens “Annie Hall.” Life, it says, is a cyclical parade of heartbreak and repeated mistakes. And it comes in such small portions.
