Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and restrained way than the excesses of Bojack Horseman and their respective written fiction (everyone should read Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory).

There's still a lot of experimentation here — a post-modernism that takes advantage of the animated medium without losing the plot, just very little playing around with what a television show can be just for the sake of it. It's still of a kind with Bojack: every character is given warmth and humanity even as they're taken to trial for their sins; the voice cast is excellent, and every scene has whiplash dialogue that manages to sound both realistic and completely absurdly hilarious.

This is not an audacious leap forward by an auteur ready to take the next step; it's just a really, really good season of television informed by all of the work that they've done in the past. Is anything in here quite as powerful as the best parts of BoJack? I don't think so, but I think that might be an unfairly high bar. It's still tremendously good television, and I'm already looking forward to the second season.

(About that second season — I'm not sure any show that is more aggressively tailored to my interests has, at least in my little corner of the zeitgeist, been subject to so little fanfare. It is not obvious that this show has even been released. This is probably equal parts a condemnation of my own level of pop cultural awareness right now and just how fractious the television landscape has become.)

★★★★★