Whatever you do, don’t tell Emmy-nominated animation aficionado Raphael Bob-Waksberg that his shows might give you anxiety. At least, don’t make that the only thing you tell him.
Despite creating a critically acclaimed series like BoJack Horseman — a show that sparked endless discourse about depression, existentialism and generational trauma while somehow remaining very funny — Bob-Waksberg insists his goal isn’t to send viewers spiraling. Quite the opposite.
This time around, Bob-Waksberg is telling his most personal story yet with Netflix’s animated comedy-drama Long Story Short. The series follows the middle-class Jewish Schwooper family (voiced by Ben Feldman, Abbi Jacobson, Max Greenfield, Lisa Edelstein and Paul Reiser) as they navigate love, loss and everything in between across decades of nonlinear storytelling.
“It’s funny in some ways,” Bob-Waksberg said. “This show feels smaller than BoJack Horseman and more intimate. In other ways, it feels much more stressful than BoJack Horseman because there’s less of a remove perhaps because it’s not a Hollywood star horse. It’s a family and you’re thinking about your own mother, or your own relationship with your siblings, it cuts that much deeper.”
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“It’s a story about memory and a story about grief and it’s a story about looking back,” he said thoughtfully before quickly adding a disclaimer. “Finding balance of those emotions is very much by feeling. It’s not like there’s a specific formula, and we are very much aware that this is a comedy and this show should be entertaining first and foremost. It is not a therapy session. I sometimes worry that conversations like this one read to people who have not seen the show that I’m saying like, ‘Yes, the show is intense and anxiety inducing and, buckle up, get ready, eat your vegetables, this show is going to be hard emotional labor.’ And that’s not true. I think the show is light, fun and hilarious and some of the jokes cut deep and some of the stories cut deep, but in a way that feels like a roller coaster.”
Below, Bob-Waksberg talks to Deadline about crafting the humor, heartbreak and everyday chaos at the center of Long Story Short.
DEADLINE: In what ways did you explore life’s ebbs and flows in Long Story Short differently from BoJack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie and Undone?
RAPHAEL BOB-WAKSBERG: I felt like by placing this show in a more realistic milieu, it allowed me to zoom in on some character relationships, family moments and other stuff that felt very relatable and honest. Also, things that were maybe too small for some of the other shows that I’ve worked on that would get swallowed up by the large operatic drama of BoJack or the hyper-real world of Tuca & Bertie. So, I really appreciated the opportunity to zoom in on family language and the inside jokes of a family and the shared history and the way this history bubbles up in new and different ways. I like the opportunity to go small for a cartoon, but this is still pretty big.
One of the things we used to say in the writers’ room is like, any given episode shouldn’t be more than 30% cartoony than any given episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. So that was our touchpoint as opposed to the wildness of some of the other cartoons I’ve worked on. We thought it would feel real, because for a cartoon it feels very real and small even while we’re doing things like letting wolves loose on a middle school campus and having mattresses explode out of tubes. But I thought this would be a really fun opportunity to go small in that way.
DEADLINE: This show dives into Jewish culture more so than your other shows, right? Can you talk about the unearthing of that for you as a creator?
BOB-WAKSBERG: Undone does a little bit, especially in its second season. But this is definitely the most Jewish forward thing I’ve worked on or written. Part of that for me was realizing I have this whole other side of my personality, history and knowledge base that I haven’t utilized yet. As a writer, you should ask yourself, “What haven’t I done yet?” And I realized I have all these reactions, thoughts and feelings about Jews and Jewish culture. Even beyond Jewish culture, because this is also versus the culture that I grew up with in my family or the people that were in my community. I feel like I hadn’t really tapped into that before, I felt like I have some observations or maybe more universal ideas than I might think because they feel so specific to me.
DEADLINE: I really enjoyed the different diverse aspects in having a Black Jewish character but then also in showing the more conservative religions that aren’t explored too much in mainstream media for films and TV. Yoshi’s change to a modern orthodox Jew becomes a huge turning point in the show and kind of starts this family rift.
BOB-WAKSBERG: Well, as you’re alluding to, I wanted to write about all kinds of Jews. That was important to me from the beginning to understand that my view was limited and that I could only cover so much with one family. There are whole areas of Jewish culture and peoplehood that we do not get into just because there’s only so far, we can branch out. In a sense, every Jewish person is an island and an identity unto themselves, but I wanted to go in on a mostly white Ashkenazi, upper middle-class family. I also thought about how many different kinds of Jews or ways of thinking about Judaism could I get to in one season? This happens in a lot of families that you’re raised one way, and this is not just in Jewish families, but in all families, and then as an adult, you forge your own path, or you think about what this means to you. And sometimes you do it in ways that your parents feel as a rejection of them and you might say, it’s not about you, it’s about me and my journey. But if you’re the parent in that relationship, of course it’s about you, of course it is a rejection of the way that you raised your child and the values that you thought you had instilled in them.
We did a screening of the episode that you’re referring to called “The Intervention” a couple nights ago for a mixed crowd and it was interesting to even feel, while watching the episode in the audience, the sympathy was parted with different characters for different people. And some really saw themselves as the child straining under the pressure of this oppressive mother, and some really saw themselves as the mother feeling rejected and blamed by this ungrateful child. One of the things I’m really proud of about the show is that it is a show that different people can watch and come away with different feelings about. Or you could watch it with someone in your own family and then have a conversation afterwards and realize maybe you weren’t even watching the same episode in the same way.
DEADLINE: I felt anxious a lot of the time watching this show, especially when there’s so much cross-talk and chaos in a single-family visit. Can you talk about the process of building this anxiety and comedy?
BOB-WAKSBERG: Well, it’s funny in some ways, as I said, this show feels smaller than BoJack Horseman and more intimate. And in other ways, I think it feels much more stressful than BoJack Horseman, because there’s less of a remove perhaps because it’s not a Hollywood star horse, it’s like a family and you’re thinking about your own mother or your own relationship with your siblings, I think it cuts that much deeper.
Finding balance of those emotions is very much by feeling. It’s not like there’s a specific formula, and we are very much aware that this is a comedy, and this show should be entertaining first and foremost. It is not a therapy session. I sometimes worry that conversations like this one read to people who have not seen the show that I’m saying like, “Yes, the show is intense and anxiety inducing and buckle up, get ready, eat your vegetables, this show is going to be hard emotional labor.” And that’s not true. I think the show is light, fun and hilarious and some of the jokes cut deep and some of the stories cut deep, but in a way that feels like a roller coaster.
So, we are constantly looking at it scene by scene. Is this funny enough? Is this interesting enough? Is this entertaining enough? But we also talk about like, what are the emotions that we’re examining in this episode? What is the story really about? That’s a question that I started asking early on BoJack and it’s carried with me to all my shows. As we are crafting an episode, I will often ask my writer, what is this episode about? And just clarifying that one sentence, that theme, that idea really allows everything else to fall into place because then if a scene isn’t working, you can ask yourself, well, is it in service of what we have said this episode is about or is it just something else? And if it’s just something else, that might be why it doesn’t quite feel right.
DEADLINE: Not to pit your babies against each other, but do you have a favorite joke or episode?
BOB-WAKSBERG: I don’t know. Much of what I find funny in the show is because I’m a writer and I spend so much time with the scripts and with the words. What delights me most is the artwork. It’s the stuff that I’m less involved in as I go: that’s such a funny picture or the way we animated this character making a face is so funny to me in this moment. Or the actors too, the line reads they bring in, they’re lines that I didn’t necessarily think of as jokes and they come in, and they just have this oddball presentation of it.
Now that I’m talking about this, I am thinking about in the first episode, the way Max Greenfield says, “Candles.” It’s such a weird read of the word candles, and it always makes me laugh even though it’s not written as a joke, it’s not an inherently funny word, but he adds so much to it. And one of things that I really love about the show and working in animation and working in television is how collaborative it is. I really get to be delighted by what my coworkers come up with, and I think the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
DEADLINE: When you were breaking the show was it always supposed to be a non-linear story?
BOB-WAKSBERG: Yeah, the jumping around in time came first. I was talking with my friend Kate Purdy, who I’d created Undone with, and we were just both batting around ideas for shows that covered time in different ways or talked about relationships over a long period perhaps out of order. And so, then it was really about, what kind of characters do I want to fill out that form with? This is maybe getting a little too process-based, but a lot of my work comes from finding a box and then figuring out how I’m going to fill it. Like for example, I want to do an episode of BoJack where it’s just BoJack talking for the whole episode, what would justify that kind of format? What kind of story would lend itself to an episode with no dialogue? What are some different ways of telling stories, and how do I want to tackle that? So often the form comes first and then the challenge for me is making sure I have a story that justifies that telling so it doesn’t just feel like a gimmick or a device.
Then the next step was thinking about this family and thinking about what is this story we’re telling and why are we jumping around in time? And then to me, what clicked in is like, well, I think it’s a story about memory and it’s a story about grief and it’s a story about looking back. And I think the way memory works is that we often jump around in our own memories, or one thing reminds us of something else, which also reminds us of something else. I thought about how often when you lose someone in your life, you haven’t necessarily ended that relationship, and it’s a little more one-sided now, but you continue to process and react to that person, and the relationship is not necessarily resolved.
So in some ways, the metaphor of the season for me was thinking about that process, and almost like these episodes we’re watching, we’re watching our characters remember and deal with their grief, even though that’s not ever present, we’re not necessarily aware that that’s what we’re doing the whole season, but as a whole, that’s going to be what it feels like. [He pauses and shifts in his seat to yell]: Again, it’s a very funny, entertaining show. I want to underline, it’s also full of ridiculous jokes and very silly.