The best new Netflix show in years is a cartoon set in the Bay Area suburbs.
From “BoJack Horseman” showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg and overflowing with Northern California references, “Long Story Short” is exceptional, even if it hits a little too close to home for Bay Area residents of a certain religious background.
Unlike “BoJack,” all the characters on the show are human, and they inhabit a world that (mostly) resembles our own. Avi Shwooper, a lapsed Jew and a father working for a Spotify stand-in, is the closest thing the show has to a main character. (Full disclosure: As a Jewish music journalist from the Bay Area, I am this show’s exact target audience.) But rather than focusing on just Avi, “Long Story Short” ambitiously delves into the lives of three generations of Avi’s family across a timeline that jumps around from the 1990s to the 2020s.
While “BoJack” took place primarily in the Hollywood Hills, Bob-Waksberg, who grew up in Palo Alto and attended Gunn High School, gets back to his Bay Area roots with “Long Story Short.” But don’t expect to see scenes set on the Golden Gate Bridge or at Alcatraz. The story unfolds in pockets of the Bay Area less commonly portrayed on television, like Mountain View, Santa Rosa and the Rockridge BART Station. The show even plays on Bay Area subregional stereotypes, most notably during one incredibly funny episode about a night out in San Francisco’s Marina District and another about faux-hippie East Bay private schools…