Within 15 minutes of speaking to Raphael Bob-Waksberg, I told him about my grandfather who passed during those tumultuous COVID years and the bookshelf I became obsessed with painting in the weeks after his death. I didn’t mean to; it’s not something I mention often to even my closest friends. But suddenly there it was, out in the open as an off-camera Netflix rep silently recorded our conversation.
“It can be hard sometimes when you’re grieving, especially when there’s other grief happening. You feel like ‘My grief is not as important,’” the “BoJack Horseman” and “Long Story Short” creator said in response. “When I lost my grandmother [during COVID], I had friends who were losing their parents, and it felt like, ‘Who am I to feel sad about this loss?’ But I think those friends would be the first to say, ‘No, your loss is valid too.’”
After a pause, Bob-Waksberg noted he wasn’t even sure if we were talking about “Long Story Short” anymore. We weren’t. But also, in the way of this showrunner whose work spans everything from the dumbest puns to painfully accurate examinations of addiction, loss and self-hatred, we were.
When “BoJack Horseman” premiered on Netflix over a decade ago, it started as a silly animated comedy about an out-of-work actor clinging to his glory days on a “Fully House”-esque sitcom. But as the series continued, its nuance and emotional complexity evolved. In the first season, the about-face from silly horse show to deep character study was so notable that IndieWire’s critics adapted an informal policy of only grading Netflix shows after watching the full season. By the Emmy-nominated show’s end in 2020, the comedy was routinely included on lists of the greatest TV shows of all time.
Unlike “BoJack,” there’s no slow build to “Long Story Short.” This show about family, loss and love is all emotional complexity from the moment you press play. The animated comedy begins with the Schwooper and Schwartz family arguing in the car as they travel to Naomi’s (Lisa Edelstein) mom’s funeral. Desperate to comfort his bereaved mother, the eldest kid Avi (Ben Feldman) tells his mom at least now his grandmother can be with her husband. Naomi and Elliot (Paul Reiser) quickly correct him, explaining that Jewish people don’t believe in heaven.
“Is that it? You’d think Jews could have negotiated a better deal,” Avi wryly says to himself, prompting an unexpected laugh from his mom.
That’s the tone that’s woven throughout “Long Story Short,” which has already been renewed for a Season 2. It’s complicated, sometimes bleak and loving. But above all else it’s heart-achingly sincere as it tells the story of one family coping with the loss of its matriarchs.
“One thing I’m proud of in my work is my increasing comfort with sincerity. There’s been a trajectory of shedding the armor, perhaps, of irony and indulging in the vulnerability of sincerity. I hope people respond to it,” Bob-Waksberg said.
The messiness of both grief and life itself translates to the very format of this animated comedy. Instead of following a strict timeline, the series jumps between moments in the lives of the Schwooper and Schwartz family. One minute Avi and his siblings — Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) — are children, poking each other and yelling insults. The next Avi is a divorced dad with a teenager of his own. Though Bob-Waksberg has experimented with non-linear storytelling before, both with the Season 4 “BoJack” episode “Time’s Arrow” and Prime Video’s “Undone,” the jumbled structure of “Long Story Short” was actually inspired by the modern TV environment.
“A lot of my favorite shows have hundreds of episodes, and you can really get lost in these worlds and watch these characters grow and change — or not grow and change as the case may be,” he explained. “It’s hard to do with only a 10-episode order, for example, or in this new TV landscape where you can’t expect to get to 100 episodes. I thought this might be a fun way to shortcut that a little bit.”
This messiness also bleeds into the visual language of the show. Nearly every still of the show looks like it could stand on its own as a distinct work of art, a “handmade” style that can be credited to the show’s supervising producer Lisa Hanawalt, as well as art director Alison Dubois. The only directive that Bob-Waksberg had for the duo was that the series didn’t look like “BoJack” or “Tuca & Bertie” — the animated comedy Hanawalt created and Bob-Waksberg executive produced — so as not to confuse audiences.
“I really empowered them as the artists to do what they wanted, and I didn’t feel like I had to take a heavy hand with them because I trusted them. I knew that they would come up with great, amazing stuff,” he said. “We tried to stay diligent of like, ‘We’re going to keep it loose. We want to keep it cartoony. We want to color outside the lines a little bit.’”
That collaboration is a major reason why Bob-Waksberg has enjoyed working in television for so long. “This is why we have other people. They bring experience, knowledge and ideas that you wouldn’t come up with, so you’re wasting your money if you’re hiring those people just to execute the vision that you have in your head from the beginning,” he said.
It’s also why he’s so “unimpressed” with artificial intelligence, a technology that may be the greatest modern threat to animation. “I think a lot of [the appeal] is for, frankly, non-artists to create what they imagine art to be; or they have something in their head, and they don’t have the technical skills to either write, draw or illustrate it, so they’re trying to create what they see in their head. And for me, the greatest pleasure in art is not knowing ahead of time. It’s the discovery of it. It’s the collaboration,” Bob-Waksberg said.
Though “Long Story Short” may feel messy and loose, that tone is an illusion that was the result of careful planning behind the scenes. The team had to first hone in on the emotional scope of this show. While you can get away with something as wild as JD Salinger creating a new celebrity game show on “BoJack,” “Long Story Short” is far more grounded in order to keep the focus on its central family.
“It doesn’t get quite as zany, but it also doesn’t get quite as bleak,” he said. “It’s about using that constraint and finding all the gradations of that.”
Years of working in animation — a medium where even the smallest rewrite can cause major delays and costs — also taught Bob-Waksberg to keep his stories and jokes as tight as possible. “There really is a pressure to just tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten,” he said. “You get these very densely packed episodes of, hopefully, just the good stuff.”
As for exactly what that good stuff is, like loss itself, it’s harder to describe.
“The show is, in many places, a conversation about grief, and I hope it will continue to be that for many years to come,” Bob-Waksberg said.
“Long Story Short” is now streaming on Netflix.
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