Long Story Short

Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s 10-episode first season is an immensely moving, blisteringly funny temporal travelogue.

It plays out like a novel, leaping backward and forward across decades. And just as BoJack did when it premiered in 2014, Long Story Short feels like something entirely new.

It’s wildly funny, swinging, like “Bojack,” from deep emotion to loony tune slapstick.

It's a macro piece of work, fueled by its attention to the micro. To achieve that combination in just ten 25-minute episodes, and to do it in a way that looks effortless even though it clearly was not, makes this one of the best TV shows of 2025.

A 10-episode Netflix comedy that plays more like a powerful short story anthology than a traditional season of laugh-inducing television. With his writing team, Bob-Waksberg jumps around chronologically in the lives of the Schwooper family, going almost randomly from character to character and time period to time period in each episode, telling self-contained stories that gain added resonance in the accumulation.

Though “Long Story Short” deals with universal experiences like family and loss, it goes about doing so in such a singular way it’s hard not to feel protective of an increasingly endangered species.

“Long Story Short,” premiering Friday on Netflix, is the sweet, melancholy, satirical, silly, poignant, hopeful, sometimes slapstick cartoon tale of a middle-class Jewish family, told nonchronologically from the 1990s to the 2020s. For all its exaggerations — and unexaggerated portrayals of exaggerated behaviors — it is remarkably acute, and surprisingly moving, about relations between parents and children and brothers and sisters and about the passage of time and the lives time contains.

Bob-Waksberg and his collaborators retain their impressive gift for devising ludicrous comic set pieces to go alongside the heavier material.

Bob-Waksberg has an eye for humorous details that ring true. .... Yet Story also contains the universal, meaning-of-life-level insights that made BoJack a classic and his trippy, underacknowledged Amazon series Undone just as enthralling. Like those shows, it is fascinated—and moved—by our subjective experiences of relationships and of time, and how the stories we tell ourselves about those things make us the people we are.

It’s a minor creative miracle, a rapid-fire animated comedy with tremendous heart and a bold narrative structure that only enhances the emotional impact.

Long Story Short is an uncommonly entertaining and inventive dramedy that feels like a pure memoir even as it weaves in and out of the outlandish. It's a sturdy foundation of considerable depth.

While Long Story Short hasn't yet come close to exploring all of its themes with depth, it takes the story pretty far in just ten tightly-packed episodes. For all their flaws, and likely because of them, it's easy to see yourself in the Schwoopers and root for them to push past the roadblocks that seem so insurmountable in their quest to connect.

Long Story Short is a warm family comedy that will hit home to some degree to anyone who has a loving but complicated relationship with their families.

Yet like a novel with frustrating passages that is nonetheless difficult to put down, the sheer time-hopping scale of Long Story Short pulls you through its 10 episodes. Some of the unlikeliest conceits turn out to rank among the show’s best.

Long review short, Long Story Short might not hit with everybody who loved BoJack Horseman, but it’s full of small, immediate pleasures before delivering something potent and completely relatable by the end.