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Raphael Bob-Waksberg and his editor Brian Swanson were discussing how to make egg salad in a way that accommodated both the laws of animation and Halakah. It was a March afternoon in Beverly Grove, and they were at the “radioplay” stage of Bob-Waksberg’s new animated series, Long Story Short, when a rough cut of an episode plays out in audio and they have to decide which jokes to cut and which takes to use. In this episode, one of the main characters, 20-something Yoshi (Max Greenfield), is staying at a Modern Orthodox family’s house in L.A. and chatting with the father, who offers to make him egg salad. “Would they use a refrigerator?” Swanson asked. Bob-Waksberg pondered. “It’s not Shabbat yet. Where else would they keep the eggs?”
Long Story Short is Bob-Waksberg’s first TV project since the end of BoJack Horseman, the first adult animated Netflix show at a time when you could count Netflix original series on one hand. The streaming service didn’t even have an animation department yet. “I was 29 when I sold it, and it came out the week of my 30th birthday,” says Bob-Waksberg. “Within one month, I turned 30, my first show premiered, and I met the woman who became my wife. It was a very eventful August.” The dark Hollywood satire and character study about a washed-up horse actor and the people he’s damaged was unlike anything else on TV at the time. There was a disarming silliness to its world of humans and anthropomorphic animals working in showbiz. Sight gags and wordplay abounded: There’s an underwater news channel called MSNBSea and a golden-retriever boyfriend who’s a literal golden retriever. But it was also deeply ambitious in its storytelling, tackling topics like addiction, generational trauma, and sexual assault with an emotional clarity that made it one of the best-regarded series of the decade.
It’s a show that continues to inspire passionate, enduring fandom. After the radio-play egg debate, actor Aaron Paul, who voiced Todd Chavez on BoJack, stopped by the studio to pick up a piece of custom art he had asked production designer Lisa Hanawalt to make for his friend, a huge fan who once went as Todd for Halloween. I followed Paul, Bob-Waksberg, and Hanawalt into her office, where she unveiled the piece: a drawing of BoJack with a speech bubble saying and you think you’re the bad guy! to … Billie Eilish. (“I promise this wasn’t staged,” Bob-Waksberg told me.)
Bob-Waksberg’s new series follows a Bay Area family called the Schwoopers—their last name is an amalgamation of their parents’ surnames, Schwartz and Cooper—over decades as they deal with marriage, divorce, kids, COVID, identity crises, Jewishness, and a wolf infestation at school. Shows mining comedy and pathos out of the Jewish American experience are nothing new. But Bob-Waksberg lends his distinctive voice—pop-culture hyperliterate, mental-health attuned, wordplay obsessed—to an animated family comedy that feels wholly original, offering a deft combination of zaniness and compelling character development.
Netflix is betting big on the show; it’s been renewed for a second season already even though the show hasn’t premiered. It also represents a departure for Bob-Waksberg. Now the father of two young children, his new show explores the dynamics of a close-knit family in a much more personal way than BoJack Horseman did. But even if the series were not about a family anything like his own, it would still be a far more vulnerable work for him to put out in the world, if only because he isn’t using animals as allegorical stand-ins. “I’m taking away some of the tools that I figured out to make a show like BoJack, and now I’m tying that arm behind my back to make this show. It’s like Inigo Montoya fencing with the nondominant arm,” he says. But he insists Long Story Short isn’t autobiographical even though he also grew up in a hybrid-surname-liberal-Jewish family in the Bay Area with two younger siblings. “At some point, we needed to make a decision about where the show is set, so I put them in Northern California because I know Northern California. Why are they Jewish? Because I know how Jews talk to each other,” Bob-Waksberg says. “But I wasn’t necessarily trying to make some statement about Jews in Northern California or finally tell my story. Unless that helps sell the show. In which case, yes, this is my story.”
After a long day of bouncing from department to department at his production company, ShadowMachine, Bob-Waksberg and I went for dinner at an Italian vegan place in WeHo. Bob-Waksberg was raised a vegetarian his whole life but became vegan when he moved to L.A. 15 years ago after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, “which does a number on you.” The perpetually bright-eyed 41-year-old fit the bill of comedy showrunner in his uniform of button-down, glasses, and rotating series of baseball caps. He thought out loud as we talked in a way that came across as more thoughtful and good-humored than neurotic. He double-checked with the server about the vegan status of the menu before he ordered a pasta, telling me about an unfortunate ricotta-chicken takeout incident from another formerly vegan restaurant a few years back: “My parents were visiting, and they were like, ‘Wait a second, why would they make a fake bone?’ ”
Bob-Waksberg describes his family as fairly progressive and active in the community, referring to his parents as “professional Jews.” His father, David, led the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jewry, an organization that helped Jews in the Soviet Union emigrate from the country. His mother, Ellen Bob, ran a book and Judaica store. “My whole world was Jewish,” Bob-Waksberg says. He doesn’t think he met any non-Jews until he started doing Palo Alto children’s theater at age 9 or 10. “What was it like growing up in the Jewish community? It’s like asking the fish, ‘What’s it like growing up in water?’ It was what it was.” His Bar Mitzvah was themeless, because “the theme of Bar Mitzvah is Bar Mitzvah. You don’t get another thing on top of that.” After Jewish elementary school, he went to public middle school.
He started writing plays in high school, where he became friends with Hanawalt (“We started hanging out in the green room.” She told me. “He would go through my sketchbook and make up voices to go along with all of my drawings.”) After college at Bard, where he majored in theater and performance, he spent a few years in New York, where he performed at UCB and worked on a semi-autobiographical web-comic with Hanawalt. He moved to Los Angeles to start pitching series; among them was an idea, developed with Hanawalt, for a show about a talking horse. He owes BoJack to some lucky timing. “We had heard they weren’t looking for an animated adult show, but they were open to things, because they were new,” he told me.
In 2022, after collaborating with Hanawalt and BoJack Horseman writer Kate Purdy on their respective series Tuca & Bertie and Undone, Bob-Waksberg had a loose conversation with BoJack Horseman executive producers Noel Bright and Steven A. Cohen about some themes he had been wanting to explore. It turned out that Netflix was in the market for a family comedy. “I think I had generally written off Netflix,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I was like, I’m too weird for them. They’re doing normie stuff now. And then I thought, But I like normie stuff.” Being a parent, he says, had made him think about family dynamics in different ways. “It has me thinking back about my own family. What are the ways we get screwed up? How do your parents and sibling dynamics shape and affect you?”
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He shares an example that has a direct parallel in the show: “I was watching my little sister when we were kids, and I showed her Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and she was a little too young for it. After she saw the movie, she started swearing, and I thought, I’m responsible for this. So I said, ‘If you say that word one more time, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap,’ which is a thing I had heard somewhere. She defiantly looked at me, said the word, and I was like, Okay, we’re doing it. So I dragged her into the kitchen and I poured dish soap into her mouth.” She told this story years later, as an adult, on a family vacation, “and I guess in my memory, it had been a cute, funny story. But her memory was trauma. She was overpowered by her older brother, and assaulted, and she couldn’t do anything about it. At first I assumed, Okay, you’ve been to college and now you’re applying these words like ‘abuse’ and ‘trauma’ to the situation, that’s not fair. And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized, No, she’s right. It was abuse, and it is trauma. I was not aware of things that were all in good fun for me that were not always for them.”
These are the conversations, the tricks of memory, the small dynamics between family members, that he’s interested in exploring. Episode two, “Hannah’s Dance Recital,” begins in 1991 on a family trip to the Jersey shore. Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the queer, independent, but sensitive middle child is playing lifeguard with Avi (Ben Feldman), the oldest child who’s sweet and smart but somewhat avoidant. She pretends to drown; he is supposed to save her. Partway through her pretend drowning, he leaves to play with his cousins instead. Later in the episode, though, Shira recounts the story, and we see her perspective: When her older brother runs off, she’s hit with a big wave and actually starts drowning. The wound is still there: “I am interested in those nuances, particularly in regards to families,” says Bob-Waksberg, “the stuff that goes unspoken.”
Two days later, I attended the table read for a future episode; the last one they planned on having for a while. When Bob-Waksberg began casting, he was looking for actors who would meld with the lived-in, familial chemistry needed for the Schwoopers. Greenfield, who plays the youngest adult sibling, had a cocky energy in his audition Bob-Waksberg appreciated. “I’m reading all these parts, but obviously I’m Yoshi,” Greenfield said in the recorded audition he sent in. “It’s ridiculous that you would think about me for anybody else or anybody else for the role.” Jacobson played Emily, Todd’s childhood friend, on BoJack Horseman, so when she got an email from her agents saying that Bob-Waksberg wanted to meet with her about a new project, she was all in. “I think I said ‘yes’ before I even read the script,” she says. “I was such a fan of his, and of Lisa’s work from Bojack, that I was like, ‘Whatever you guys are doing, I’m down.’ ”
Table reads like this one, she says, are rare in modern animation; but it helps the performers actually visualize each other and develop a rhythm, because when they’re recording, they act opposite Bob-Waksberg, who reads all of the parts. After a reasonable amount of schmoozing, they all filed into the sun-filled conference room where the table read was happening. This was a Shira-heavy episode, focusing on Jacobson’s character going through a mental health crisis, an unexpectedly fruitful topic for a gag-packed episode.
On our way in, Feldman told me that even though the show’s appeal is universal, “some episodes are so inside-baseball Jew-y.” It’s a big compliment, although Feldman said he didn’t grow up religious enough to know what some of the references and traditions featured in the show mean; “My mother was a witch,” he said, as in Wiccan. Lisa Edelstein, who voices Naomi, the high-strung matriarch of the family, and gives a transformational performance she says she based on her mother, expressed how “psyched” everyone is about this coming out, especially at a “difficult time for Jews.”
I noticed she was wearing an IDF dog tag with bring them home written on it in English and Hebrew. It brings to light something notably absent from Long Story Short: This Conservative Jewish family (the religious denomination, not the political affiliation) does not mention Israel once; no Birthright, no cousin in Tel Aviv, no heated debate at the dinner table.
“It has been a relief to me that we are setting the show slightly in the past, that we did not have to talk about any of that stuff on the show itself,” Bob-Waksberg told me when I asked him about Israel’s absence, “because the Jewish experience is so much more interesting than that.” He began breaking the show’s story in earnest in October 2023, and felt that if Israel-Palestine became a part of it, “that would be the headline.” The show only goes up to the year 2022. Of course Israel’s conflict with Gaza—and Jewish American attitudes and conversations around it—precede the current violence by decades, and Bob-Waksberg has not ruled out Israel as a topic in future seasons; he just wants trust in the show and the characters to be earned first, before these things can be isolated and misconstrued. “I don’t want to create any content that is then going to make people want to boycott this show in either direction,” he said. “We will have to get into that at some point. I want to do it in a way that makes sense for our show, that doesn’t feel didactic, that doesn’t feel like scoring points. I want to do it in a way that is thoughtful, in a context where the show already exists, and people understand these characters.”
When he assembled the Long Story Short writers’ room in early 2024, he applied lessons he learned from BoJack Horseman when political spats between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in the writers’ room led to “really non-helpful arguments that didn’t help the show and also didn’t help us in our politics.” So at the beginning of his time with the Long Story Short writers, when divisive topics arose, “I said, ‘Let’s avoid those.’ If something comes up naturally, if it’s connected to the show, we can hash it out a little bit, but let’s keep it on topic and keep it about the show and keep it on our characters. This is not a group-therapy session. This is not a political rally. That’s not what we’re here for. We’ve got a job to do. I set that expectation, I was very explicit about it, and I think everyone liked that and stuck to it.”
“I have not talked to anyone on the show about my feelings about the genocide that’s happening right now,” Jacobson told me a few months after the table read. “I’m not involved creatively other than adding my voice, and the show’s not making a statement.” She admitted that she does not like the episode of Broad City in which Abbi and Ilana go on a Birthright-type trip to Israel, even if the episode isn’t a particularly flattering depiction of the program. “I feel like those characters even going on Birthright is making a statement, maybe not in the way that we would have wanted.” Regarding the lack of Israel-Palestine discourse in the show, Jacobson said, “I have thought about it a lot going into press, like this is definitely a thing people are going to talk about,” but ultimately she loves Long Story Short for what it is, because it is sweet and funny and emotionally perceptive. “This show’s about so many things,” she said. “It’s about a family that happens to be Jewish.”
Even though the show focuses on a Jewish family, Bob-Waksberg wanted a multicultural writers’ room: “We have diverse characters from different places, so a priority for me in staffing the show was making sure we have Black writers, queer writers, parents, Jews, non-Jews, people who have been divorced, so we’re never in a spot of, ‘Does this feel right or not?’ ” Bob-Waksberg told me. “We have a fair amount of lesbians on staff, and as soon as Shira starts talking about being mad at [her childhood friend and crush] Baby Feldstein in episode one, they were like, ‘I know where this is going. I know everything that happened there.’ And they were 100 percent right.” And on the other hand, as you might expect, the Jews are pitching the most antisemitic jokes, and sometimes some of the non-Jews are like, ‘Guys, my name’s going to be on this episode, too. Let’s scale it back a little.’ ”
After the table read, Bob-Waksberg and his eight season-two writers moved upstairs to the writers’ room, where the walls were plastered with timelines and family trees, drafted by script coordinator Scout Comm, and diagrams of the characters at different ages, alongside their astrological signs, a pet project to help flesh out the world, by writers assistant Grace Dowling. Dowling wrote the episode the cast just read, but now she was back at her assistant station, drafting changes to the script as the room called them out. On a whiteboard at the back of the room, the words sad orgy were crossed out in marker, and I wondered what nixed plotline that was a part of. The vibe felt like a rowdy but precocious classroom at an alternative school with Bob-Waksberg as teacher trying to get the class to focus on the task at hand. Mehar Sethi, who worked with Bob-Waksberg on BoJack Horseman, got the ball rolling, looking for alternate punchlines for a joke where a kid is drowsily talking in their sleep; the one in the script didn’t hit as hard as it could have. A reference to Freud caused a writer to ask, “What came first: The Jew or the psychology about mothers?”
The fact that it is animated means that Bob-Waksberg can go forward and backward in time with these characters as much as he wants. He’s already thought about arcs for future seasons, grandparents that have yet to be introduced, ways to push the story. The show has the makings of a classic, if Netflix gives it the space to become one. Its time-jumping structure is also a clever way of dealing with the realities of the streaming business today. “In today’s television economy, where you only get ten episodes a season, four seasons, if you’re lucky, can you build a familiarity with the characters and feel like we’ve grown and changed with them?” Bob-Waksberg said. “Can you kind of get that feeling of I’ve watched these people grow up without having to actually spend a hundred episodes to get there?”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the surname of Aaron Paul’s character on BoJack Horseman.