This article contains spoilers for Long Story Short.
I was prepared to cry buckets. Like any medicated zillennial, I had worshipped at the altar of BoJack Horseman, the Netflix hit about a washed-up sitcom actor who is also a horse. From 2014 through early 2020, the series redefined adult animation: It was surreal, structurally inventive, and a merciless satire of show business. I knew that creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s next project would bring an avalanche of wordplay—and, sooner or later, tears.
What I didn’t anticipate was how Long Story Short, Bob-Waksberg’s new Netflix series, would force me to sit with my own grief over the COVID-19 pandemic. The animated dramedy follows the Schwooper siblings—Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and Yoshi (Max Greenfield)—over decades, exploring how childhood experiences ripple into adulthood. The early episodes make no mention of the virus. Then, 16 minutes into Episode 4, Shira and her children appear in N95 masks at the grocery store. References accumulate: Shira bristles at an event without social distancing or masking precautions; Episode 6, the delightfully absurd “Wolves,” hinges on literal wolves overrunning a middle school during lockdown. These moments are played for laughs, but they carry more weight once we learn that the Schwooper matriarch died from COVID-19.
I know—it’s a hard sell. Had I known about the COVID element ahead of time, I probably wouldn’t have been so eager to watch Long Story Short. I’ve heard the sentiment from friends and co-workers and strangers online: Nobody wants to see a COVID story. We don’t want to revisit that terrible, painful thing. We turn to TV for escape—or at least to escape that.
Television has mostly obliged. Many shows ignore the pandemic altogether, existing in an alternate timeline in which it never happened. Others nod to it in passing—The Bear, for instance, recognizes its toll on restaurants. Some devote an episode, an arc, or a full season to the pandemic, including Grey’s Anatomy, New Amsterdam, The Morning Show, This Is Us, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, You, The Pitt, Superstore, and Shameless. Anecdotally, friends dismissed most of these attempts as “garbage,” “tragic,” “kinda a bummer,” and “complete ass.” For a few, the storylines were enough to ruin their favorite shows—forever.
“It feels like we’re all gaslighting ourselves and each other,” Bob-Waksberg told me. He understands why viewers don’t want to dwell on the pandemic: After years of living it and talking about it, we’re worn out, traumatized, and eager to “move on.” Still, Long Story Short exists in the real world. “It feels strange not to acknowledge it,” he said. “And now, with a bit of perspective, we can tell that story—or at least address it—in a way we couldn’t while we were living through it.”
Rather than centering a plotline or episode on the pandemic, Long Story Short takes a subtler approach. The season is loosely structured around the siblings’ grief, and its time-jumping format—with the “present day” set in 2022—allows the series to dip in and out of a world shaped by COVID, making it a meaningful plot point without sensationalizing it or overwhelming the viewer.
In truth, I found watching the series unexpectedly cathartic. There’s a solace in recognizing how the Schwoopers’ lives, like my own, have been irrevocably changed. Like the death of a loved one, COVID isn’t something that happened, then ended; nothing will ever be the same again. Long Story Short captures that immense, intimate, and collective grief—a feeling sometimes too vast to take in all at once. But in small doses, it becomes easier to hold onto. And for Bob-Waksberg, that act of remembering is entirely the point.
“Part of this comes from my experience of getting older and seeing society forget things,” he said. “I remember Holocaust survivors coming to my elementary school to talk about their experiences. That whole generation has died off now. I remember how front and center the AIDS epidemic was. We’re lucky to live in a time when that isn’t as big a concern as it once was, but it feels like we’ve forgotten the generation of people lost to it.” The thought that the same could already be happening to the people who died of COVID—or those who lost people to it—is frightening to him.
Long Story Short is, in its own way, a moving memorial of sorts—one that is funny and beautiful and sometimes hard to watch, and one that will continue now that Netflix has renewed it for a second season. “I would like to think viewers will appreciate the acknowledgment that this happened,” said Bob-Waksberg. “I just don’t want to forget it.”
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