I liked BoJack Horseman enough to watch a couple of seasons of it and I thought this new show by its creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg might be at least a little similar, with less drugs and depression. In fact, this is a different kind of show entirely. While the characters have various kinds of trauma from their childhoods, it’s actually a very wholesome show with a strong focus on Jewish culture. I was a little lost at the beginning due to the very fast paced dialogue but by the end I was thoroughly in love with the characters and their family dynamics.

This show tells the stories of the Schwooper-Schwartzes, a middle-class Jewish-American family. The parents are Avi and Naomi, the mother who dominates every discussion with her presence. Their children are Avi, the eldest son who later marries and divorces Jen; Shira, the middle daughter who is revealed to be lesbian and marries another woman Kendra; and Yoshi, the youngest son who has issues with ADHD and executive dysfunction. Being nonlinear in format, the narrative freely shifts between different time periods such that we get to see the three siblings both as children and as fully grown adults with children of their own. The show even branches out a little by showing the stories of their significant others but always with a strong focus on Jewish culture. The stories mostly take place from the 1990s up to the 2020s, plenty of time to see how the characters grow, how their dynamics change and even enough time for some of them to die.

Naomi is easily the loudest and most dominant character here as her entire schtick is to talk over everyone else and seize attention. I was somewhat put off by this at first as the dialogue flows so quickly and it’s a wild rush as the children try to keep up with her. For a while, there’s a sense that this is going to be all about the children trying to deal with their childhood trauma and arguing with one another, which I found somewhat off-putting. But the great things about this is that it all comes from a place of love. Once you get to know these characters, you understand how deep their affection for each other is and that no matter the insults or arguments, they know never to go too far and cross the line. By the end, it’s wonderful to get to know them and even if not everything works out perfectly, such as Avi and Jen’s marriage, they still end up in a good place and do alright. This is such a stark contrast from the cynicism of BoJack Horseman and I’m all for it.

Their Jewish heritage figures much more prominently than I’d expected. I thought I had my fill of that from Srugim but the American twists are interesting and I learned to appreciate the jokes as they’re more light-hearted about things here. There’s one whole episode about Kendra, Shira’s wife later on, who stumbles her way into converting for real because she was just pretending at first. When one character declares that he is now Orthodox, I chuckled at the question of Greek Orthodox or Jewish Orthodox because that was what I was wondering myself. I also appreciated that this is a more grounded show about real people though it does push the limits sometimes, such as when Yoshi is trying to sell exploding mattresses. The art looks good to me and I liked how they have a different ending song for every episode.

That said, I’m somewhat nonchalant about another season of this. They’ve covered a lot of character development in this first season already. While I don’t doubt they have plenty of story ideas to explore, the way these shows go, they usually either end up twisting the characters in all sorts of strange ways or retread the same ground repeatedly. I do recommend this first season even if it wasn’t what I was expecting.