{"id":167032,"date":"2025-08-22T17:35:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T17:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167032\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T17:35:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T17:35:11","slug":"the-creator-of-bojack-horseman-on-his-new-netflix-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167032\/","title":{"rendered":"The creator of BoJack Horseman on his new Netflix show."},"content":{"rendered":"

At last, a show that does for Jewish families what BoJack Horseman did for washed-up sitcom stars. Raphael Bob-Waksberg\u2019s Long Story Short might not be what you\u2019d expect from the creator of animation history\u2019s most self-loathing equine\u2014in fact, there are no horses at all, although a pack of (non-talking) wolves do make a key appearance. But he\u2019s channeled the same wry mixture of satire and sentiment into the Schwoopers, who the show follows through three generations and over the course of 60-plus years. Instead of making its way through the family\u2019s history in a linear fashion, Bob-Waksberg and his writers jump backward and forward in time. Sometimes the effect is revelatory, as we realize that an offhand remark is rooted in decades of resentment and repressed trauma, and sometimes it\u2019s shocking, as when the first episode cuts abruptly from a moment of romantic triumph for Avi (voiced by Ben Feldman) to a shot of him sitting, years later, ominously alone in his car, and sometimes it\u2019s just good for a laugh, as when Avi, somewhere near the dawn of the internet, gets his dream job as the music editor at an alternative weekly newspaper (womp womp). The tone can switch from wistful to goofy in an instant, and sometimes it\u2019s both at the same time: The exchange Avi has with his stern, relentlessly needy mother (Lisa Edelstein) about \u201cthe Haim girls<\/a>\u201d is a silly aside that also emerges as one of the few affectionate conversations we ever see them have.<\/p>\n

In some ways, Long Story Short is classic TV fare: a half-hour show about two parents and their three children, navigating the perils and pitfalls of life, love, and each other. But it\u2019s far more melancholy than a typical network sitcom, and while Jewish family life is embedded in the origins of the format<\/a>, it\u2019s rare that a major show is quite so explicit about or insistent on its characters\u2019 Jewishness. (As if to bless one of its predecessors, the show cast Paul Reiser as the family patriarch, Elliot.) In an interview over video chat, Bob-Waksberg talked about what took him from Hollywood to the Bay Area, how his family feels about the new series, and the BoJack lessons he\u2019s still learning. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.<\/p>\n

Sam Adams: You\u2019ve said that being Jewish has informed everything you\u2019ve done\u2014that BoJack Horseman, for example, was about <\/strong>teshuvah<\/strong><\/a>. But Long Story Short is obviously much more textually about the subject. What brought you to tell this kind of story now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: <\/strong>Well, I was running out of other things to talk about, and you\u2019ve got to keep the lights on. I think part of it was I\u2019m getting older, I have kids of my own now, and so I\u2019m thinking about my identity and what I want to pass on to my kids, or not. I\u2019m thinking about what I got from my parents, and what I want to emulate from that experience and what I want to maybe correct. I guess I probably could have come up with some fun metaphor instead of just making it about Jews.<\/p>\n

The show is arriving at a point when a lot of American Jews, at least, are struggling with what that means. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s always simmering under the surface, but I won\u2019t challenge your premise of \u201cnow more than ever.\u201d It\u2019s an interesting time, and even in the making of the show, there was an awareness of How are people going to take this? or What are we saying here? We did try to be diligent and thoughtful about what we\u2019re including and what we\u2019re not talking about\u2014not feeling like we needed to make a statement about every aspect of Jewish life or take a position on everything, but instead really live in the world of these characters and explore some things through them. I was interested in telling a character story more than I was in highlighting an opinion or a fact about Jewish life.<\/p>\n

Your mother once told a reporter, \u201cI\u2019m delighted to be known as Raphael\u2019s mother, as long as people don\u2019t think <\/strong>BoJack\u2019s mother is based on me<\/strong><\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s relatively easy when the character in question is also a horse. But while none of the characters in Long Story Short is as terrible as BoJack\u2019s parents, they\u2019re also much closer to you\u2014not just because they\u2019re human, but in ways like the fact that the children\u2019s last name, Schwooper, is an amalgam of their parents\u2019 Schwartz and Cooper, which isn\u2019t far from how your surname came to be. Did you have conversations with your family while you were working on it about what to expect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, constantly. I have shown my family the pilot now already, and I think they are delighted by the ways in which it is definitely not them. They were also delighted by the ways in which it is, and the dynamics and the patterns that they recognize. Anyone who knows my mother will not mistake her for Naomi, which I think is one of the things she might\u2019ve been afraid of, that people in her life might be like, \u201cDid you say that to your son?\u201d Strangers thinking that\u2019s my real mom is less of a concern for her.<\/p>\n

When the did the time-jump aspect become a part of the show, and what do you like about that device? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Very early. I think that was part of the original idea of the show. I\u2019d been talking to a friend of mine, Kate Purdy, who I made Undone<\/a> with, and she got me this book by Chris Ware, Building Stories<\/a>, and she told me, \u201cYou\u2019re going to love this.\u201d I was like, \u201cAll right, there\u2019s a lot of books I\u2019m \u2018going to love.\u2019 We\u2019ll see.\u201d It went on the shelf, and years later I pulled it down. And I loved it, particularly the way it jumps around in time. I would say Boyhood<\/a> is a similar thing, in that it\u2019s not always about the milestones. We\u2019re just checking in with these people at different points.<\/p>\n

I also felt like a lot of the shows that I love or have loved in the past are shows that went on for over 100 episodes. You really watch these characters grow, and feel like I was part of the family, or part of the friend group or part of that office. In the modern TV landscape, I\u2019m not going to get that long a leash. So on a cynical level, I guess you could say I was trying to shortcut that emotional connection a little bit, and make it feel by the end of 10 episodes like we\u2019d spent 100 episodes with this family. We\u2019ll see if that experiment works or not.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a puzzle show where the time jumps always serve to unlock some mystery about the characters, although things also pay off that you\u2019re not expecting to. I thought the reference to \u201cthe Great Passover Candy Debacle of 2002\u201d was just a throwaway joke, until you brought it back seven episodes later. <\/strong><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t want it to feel like homework. There are these dates that pop up at the beginning of every episode, but I think a good chunk of our audience is going to immediately forget what year it is as soon as they see it\u2014and that\u2019s OK. Every episode gives you all the information you need to understand that story. I think of it as being both a lean-back show and a lean-forward show. If you want to be a fanatic about it and draw up diagrams and figure out the chronological order of events and who\u2019s related to who in what ways, the information is there for you. But we didn\u2019t want you to feel the first time watching that you\u2019re missing out, or, I think that\u2019s something that\u2019s going to make me laugh in three episodes, but I don\u2019t really get it now. I don\u2019t want that to be the prevailing feeling as you\u2019re watching the show, because that\u2019s not a good time.<\/p>\n

This is a much more realistic show than BoJack, but it still has its outlandish moments: Yoshi spends an entire episode selling mattresses that fold up into tiny tubes, and when Avi\u2019s daughter\u2019s school closes because of COVID, a classroom is taken over by a pack of wolves. What sorts of discussions did you have about how cartoony you wanted to get? <\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re working in animation, but really if you\u2019re working in television in general, it\u2019s never going to be 100 percent true to life. On BoJack, I was so anxious about that from the beginning that I wanted it\u2014and this is such a silly thing to say, because even my writing on the pilot was so goofy and cartoony\u2014but I was like, \u201cI want it to feel like it\u2019s really Los Angeles and it\u2019s really real.\u201d Mike Hollingsworth was the supervising director, and he was the one who was like, \u201cI\u2019m going to throw a bunch of animal jokes into these transitions between scenes.\u201d Looking back, it\u2019s like, oh my God, that made the show. No one would\u2019ve watched Episode 2 if not for some of those goofy gags.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve created certain rules for myself about how Long Story Short operates and doesn\u2019t operate. We might break those rules if the right story comes to us or the right joke presents itself, but I think it is trying to keep a slightly tighter spectrum. BoJack was a TV show that knew it was a TV show. The characters themselves were not breaking the fourth wall or looking right at camera, but we\u2019d do jokes like, \u201cI\u2019ve got all these spaghetti strainers<\/a>, and I don\u2019t remember why I got them, but I\u2019m sure it\u2019s going to pay off big.\u201d That lampshading<\/a> kind of stuff. In this show, we don\u2019t do that. This is not a show that knows it\u2019s a TV show.<\/p>\n

When Shira and Kendra are looking at preschools, one of their potential choices is Altman Academy, and when she\u2019s a teenager, Avi\u2019s daughter, Hannah, says she\u2019s \u201ctrying to do with photos what Robert Altman did with sound.\u201d Altman is famous for pioneering overlapping dialogue in movies, and Long Story Short\u2019s characters are constantly talking over each other, in a way the subtitles constantly struggle to keep up with. Can you talk about Altman\u2019s influence on the show?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually a bit of a happy accident, honestly, because Altman Academy was something else, and the name didn\u2019t clear. So we needed a name for a school, and there was a girl in my freshman dorm named Alex Altman. It\u2019s also an alt for the school. And I totally forgot we name-checked Robert Altman in the next episode. I wouldn\u2019t say he was a conscious influence.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the overlapping thing, I think that just feels more honestly Jewish to me. I was trying to capture the rhythms of how my family talks and how people I know talk to each other. Animation, just on a technical level, offers an opportunity to be more precise about that than you could in live action. If you\u2019re recording two people on the day and they\u2019re talking over each other, you\u2019ve got to be really careful that you\u2019re picking up everything you need to hear.
But when you\u2019re recording actors separately, you can control the volume, you can control the timing. There\u2019s a lot of dual dialogue written in the script, and then even more in the editing; it was like, oh, she knows what he\u2019s going to say. She doesn\u2019t have to wait for him to finish this sentence before she starts. Let\u2019s add more overlap there and keep that moving.<\/p>\n

Speaking of voices, you <\/strong>spoke very candidly<\/strong><\/a> to my former Slate colleague Inkoo Kang in 2018 about the decision to cast Alison Brie as BoJack\u2019s Diane Nguyen, and how if you had to do over again you would absolutely have cast a Vietnamese American actor instead. Identity is much more central in Long Story Short, so I\u2019m wondering how that new understanding of who is appropriate for what role played in who you cast this time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the obvious read would be: Oh, this time he\u2019s really crossing all his T\u2019s and dotting his I\u2019s. Or the more cynical read is: Oh, when it\u2019s his people, he has to cast all Jews. But the truth is, I think it\u2019s more complicated than that, and I came away from that conversation, or those many conversations, with a more nuanced attitude than maybe even I expressed. I really wanted at the time to express my regret and my remorse, but I don\u2019t necessarily believe that every actor has to line up with their character that they\u2019re playing in every way. Obviously not. Nobody could.<\/p>\n

One of my big takeaways from that experience in talking to a lot of Asian Americans about that casting was that I had made some assumptions based on my experience as a Jew seeing non-Jewish actors play Jewish characters and being like, \u201cOh, that\u2019s a little weird.\u201d Or maybe they\u2019re not quite nailing the pronunciation there, but it\u2019s not that big of a deal. It\u2019s annoying, but it\u2019s OK. I hadn\u2019t quite realized the ways in which this community and this kind of representation was different. I think the big lesson was just we\u2019re not all the same. On this show we have non-Jews playing Jews too.<\/p>\n

I think my bigger mistake on BoJack was not having Vietnamese American writers on the show. They could have even advised me about the casting or could have helped me navigate that better. The real complaint about Diane from Vietnamese American viewers was that she didn\u2019t feel authentically Vietnamese. And that wasn\u2019t because of Alison\u2019s performance. It was about the way the character was crafted. Because she was a white woman, that made me more skittish about leaning into some of the Vietnamese stories that we might\u2019ve told otherwise.<\/p>\n

Long Story Short<\/strong> isn\u2019t autobiographical, so none of the characters are you. But you\u2019ve got a whole spectrum of characters who relate to their Jewishness in different ways. Some essentially become secular as the years go on. Others turn toward more traditional forms of Judaism. You\u2019ve even got a non-Jewish character from outside the family who converts. So I\u2019m wondering, is there a character whose relationship to their Jewishness, or specifically their faith, feels closest to your own?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good question. Yes. But I don\u2019t know if I should say it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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OK.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the truth is all of them represent different voices I have in my head who are having these conversations with each other. My own relationship to religion is a bit of a moving target. There are moments where I feel more connected to it and moments where I feel more distant from it, and even the characters themselves move through that. So no, I don\u2019t know if there is one specifically.<\/p>\n

In \u201cHannah\u2019s Dance Recital,\u201d you have a running gag about how all the other students\u2019 dances are scored to increasingly absurd parodies of Christmas songs, including one that is essentially \u201cMonster Mash.\u201d What was the process of writing those songs like, and is there one you hope will enter the canon for real?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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    I was working in collaboration with Jesse Novak, who did all the music for the show, and Kelly Galuska, who wrote that episode, and I really wanted to express, in perhaps a more cartoony way, what it feels like to be a non-Christian during Christmas, in a way that most, even atheist, Christians don\u2019t realize how enveloping it is. I\u2019ve had conversations with people who\u2019ll be like, \u201cWell, I\u2019m not a Christian, but Christmas is for everybody.\u201d But it\u2019s not for you if that\u2019s not how you grew up. It\u2019s not for me. I\u2019m a heterosexual white man; most of the time I feel like I fit in just fine. But there are these moments in American culture where it\u2019s really like, Whoa, I am not a part of this, and I\u2019m being pushed off to the outside. And so obviously through comedic escalation, we exaggerate that a little bit, but this feeling of even this event which is not religious in nature, that most people aren\u2019t even clocking how Christmassy it is, but it is very explicitly Christmassy and Christian.<\/p>\n

    You have that line about how, sure, other faiths are fine\u2014like, you can stay. <\/strong><\/p>\n

    \u201cRamadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, too: We tolerate them all, but there\u2019s nothing like Christmas.\u201d That\u2019s the subtext of a lot of it.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019ll see if I can bust that out at the family Christmas party this year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    We just did these little snippets, but we\u2019ve got to write full-length versions of these songs. We should put out a full album.<\/p>\n

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