'Long Story Short' review: From 'BoJack Horseman' creator: An animated family you'll never forget

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The "BoJack Horseman" creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg returns to Netflix with "Long Story Short," an animated series that depicts key moments in the lives of three siblings over the course of several decades.

They are Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield), part of a middle-class Jewish family from the San Francisco Bay Area. Their parents are Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and Elliott Cooper (Paul Reiser). The siblings share the last name of Schwooper, a Schwartz-Cooper portmanteau.

"Long Story Short" jumps back and forth through the years in a collection of vignettes, with episodes focusing on Yoshi's bar mitzvah, Shira's efforts to conceive with her wife Kendra (Nicole Byer) and more. Its first season runs 10 episodes, and it has been renewed for a second.

MY SAY When you step back and take stock of things, memories work a lot like they do in "Long Story Short." They come flooding back in an unpredictable way, rather than in some sort of linear context, and sometimes even the most ordinary occurrence on the most ordinary day can take on far greater significance that it had in the moment.

The show is constructed as a collection of reflections, an amalgamation of experiences that, when taken together, reveal something transcendent about this ordinary family. 

That's not to suggest this is some sort of high-minded philosophical meditation, an artistic abstraction. It's very much relatable and often funny, even as it sometimes feels like it's holding up a mirror to your own life.

Bob-Waksberg specializes in dark, cutting humor, and "Long Story Short" has plenty to spare. Sometimes, things get almost breathtakingly awkward. When Avi brings home his girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) to meet the family, picking the absolute wrong weekend to do so, the passive aggressiveness and little social slights are as torturous as anything in a horror movie.

A digression into Yoshi's efforts, as a young adult, to sell inflatable mattresses in tubes (yes, they're called TAMIT, for There's a Mattress in There) is both a master class in short-form absurdism and rather poignant.

Through it all, the creator loves these people, with all their flaws, and he knows how to connect these threads into something greater.

"Long Story Short" begins in 1996, with the family lost on the way to the cemetery for the funeral of Naomi's mother, and reflecting on Jewish conceptions of heaven. 

"You don't live a good, meaningful life for some reward later," Elliott tells his kids. "You live a good meaningful life, to live a good meaningful life."

As we get to know this family, as we see them at their highest and lowest, through scenes filled with sadness and struggle and others that find the beauty in small gestures of love and faith, we're presented above all with people striving to live exactly that sort of life.

BOTTOM LINE It's a wonderful show. Don't miss it.