‘Long Story Short’ Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg On ‘BoJack’ Lessons, Judaism, And What To Expect From Season 2

BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg talks hit Netflix series Long Story Short

Josh Weiss: Take me back to the beginning. Where did the idea for the series come from?

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: It came from a few different places at once. One, I was really interested in telling a story about characters over time and felt like TV and animation offered the opportunity to show time passing in a way I hadn’t really seen animation do before. A lot of animation is very status quo-oriented. The classic example of that is The Simpsons; you have this moving timeline where Bart is always a 10-year-old. I felt like, “Ooo, I could do the opposite of that!” by having an episode set in the ‘90s, having an episode set in the 2000s, and not really landing in one place, necessarily. Seeing characters age and grow, seeing the ways characters change or don’t change, seeing the way relationships adjust, seeing the way small resentments can build. Storytelling-wise, that felt really interesting to me. I was also really interested in family. There’s so much there to dig into, the way siblings talk to and feel about each other. I wanted to capture a family that felt and looked like my family, the way we talked to each other. The inscrutable inside jokes and references to the history of us. I feel like families have their own language that’s specific to them that I don’t always see in families in TV and movies.

Weiss: How difficult was it to structure the narrative out of order?

Bob-Waksberg: There’s a nerdy part of my brain that liked the spreadsheets and timelines and family trees. Remembering how old anybody was in any given year, who was married when, or who was divorced when. I think it’s fun for a certain segment of our audience as well. One thing we tried to do with the show is make it clear that you can engage with it on whatever level you want. Every episode gives you the information you need to enjoy that episode. But then, on a second watch-through, you can start to compile, “Oh, when he said that, it was a reference to this thing that happened in that episode.” Or, “Oh, this is a result of this relationship breaking in that way.” We wanted it to feel both accessible and episodic, but also rich, deep, and dense at the same time.

Weiss: Talk to me about the Jewish aspect of the series…

Bob-Waksberg: It’s a weird thing where we as Jews maybe feel both underrepresented and overrepresented at the same time. You can’t really say there have never been Jews on television before when there have been two very successful, long-running sitcoms called The Goldbergs that were unrelated to each other in television’s history. We have Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Transparent, Nobody Wants This, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It goes on and on. So, just making the characters Jewish did not feel like a novelty to me. I’m not doing it for representation because I feel like our story needs to be told or explained to non-Jewish audiences. It’s more that I wanted the characters to feel specific. This is a world I really know that I hadn’t explored a lot in my other work. The rhythms of the family and the community that I grew up with—and the specificity of Jewishness—felt really important to me.

Weiss: The show uses a lot of esoteric Jewish terms like “shul” (synagogue) and “Hashem” (God), which many people might not be familiar with. Did you feel like you were walking a tightrope between specificity and accessibility?

Bob-Waksberg: The stories we’re telling on the show are pretty universal. It’s about parents and children, spouses and siblings. I think that’s pretty legible, even if you don’t know some of the code words. I watch medical shows and I’ve got no idea what they’re talking about half the time, but I [generally understand] what they’re talking about. “Okay, this patient is dying, they need to save his life.” I don’t understand all the mumbo-jumbo. If it’s a good show, I get it. And so, I had faith that the texture of [our] show might read as illegible to some, but if they actually watched it, it wouldn’t be a turn off at all. They’d go, “Okay, I don’t know what that word means, but I get she’s angry.” It’s not that opaque.

Weiss: Were you ever worried about dipping into certain Jewish stereotypes?

Bob-Waksberg: I think you can dip into them. I don’t think you want to linger there, but yes, this is something I wanted to be careful about. On our show, we have a Jewish mother who definitely has some of those traits that might veer into stereotypes. I think the way we correct for it is that we dimensionalize it, and treat her with dignity. We allow her these flaws or more annoying traits. I didn’t want to shy away from that, but instead wanted to maybe justify some of those traits or explain why this character might be the way she is. I think Lisa Edelstein does an amazing job playing this mother, and she got it from the beginning that this is a complicated, nuanced woman. She is not just a foil for her kids who think she’s annoying. Giving that dignity to all of the characters prevents us from falling into the stereotypes or using them in a cheap way. It allows us to explore those archetypes and even comment on them in ways that I hope might ultimately be healing.

Weiss: Speaking of the voice cast, how important was it to hire Jewish actors for these roles?

Bob-Waksberg: That was never the litmus test. Nicole Byer [Shira’s wife Kendra] is not Jewish, for example, and she’s playing a Jewish character. But it certainly helped, and there’s no shortage of Jewish actors, so it’s not like we had to look really hard to find [them]. When we were casting BoJack Horseman, I cast a White actress to play a Vietnamese character and realized too late what a missed opportunity that was for a Vietnamese actress, who would have been so thrilled to get to play this character. And also, the freedom that could have allotted us to tell all kinds of stories we didn’t get to tell on that show. And so, I wanted this show to have a fair amount of the representation I was depicting both in front of and behind the camera, although that’s not quite right because it’s animated. I’ll say, “In the booth.” We have Queer characters and wanted Queer people involved. We have Black characters and wanted Black people involved. It was really important to us that we not overlook some segment of our characters’ identities, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be one-to-one all the time. It just means that it’s helpful to think about because it leads to better, more interesting stories.

Weiss: Right off the bat, you’ve set this series apart from BoJack Horseman by dealing with a strictly human cast. In what other ways did you hope to differentiate Long Story Short from your previous work?

Bob-Waksberg: I was less interested in setting it apart in the eyes of the audience. I’m more interested in setting it apart for myself, personally. I just don’t want to feel like I’m repeating myself or exploring the same things. Obviously, I have my pet interests and idiosyncrasies and things that I think are funny and interesting. There’s going to be a fair amount of overlap. If you loved BoJack Horseman and are just now hearing that this show exists, don’t be turned off by the fact that it doesn’t have talking animals. I think you will see a lot in common with the old show, but it’s also not redundant. It really is its own thing. It has its own pace, its own tone. The season isn’t structured the same way and we’re not going for the same kind of feelings. That’s not to prove some point. It’s just that I’m a different writer now than I was 10 years ago and I’m interested in telling stories in a different way.

Weiss: The two shows definitely have the same sense of outrageous, absurdist humor. Do you have a specific strategy for juggling silliness with the more grounded stuff?

Bob-Waksberg: One thing I found true on BoJack—which was in some ways very cartoony and in some ways very grounded—is that people really responded to the more grounded elements. People will say things like, “BoJack Horseman is the most realistic show on television.” It’s like, “No, it’s not! It’s a talking horse!” But because in contrast to other cartoony shows, it felt very grounded. I feel like with this show, we want to be small and intimate and internal. We want it to feel more real and grounded than other cartoon shows. But in order to do that, you don’t have to go all the way to real-life naturalism. It can still be a cartoon and be funny and goofy and have silly, wild, absurdist moments. But if you don’t go all the way there and you zoom in on these small intimate moments, it’ll still feel very emotionally rich and sophisticated. The goal for us was, “Let’s be more grounded than BoJack Horseman, [but] we don’t have to be as grounded as, say, The Pitt.”

Weiss: What can we expect from Season 2?

Bob-Waksberg: We just get to go deeper on all [the characters]. We get to go, “Okay, what moments have we not seen? What questions do we still have? Where would we like to learn more about these characters?” And we go there. We get to see them bounce off each other in different combinations. I would say if you like Season 1, you’re gonna love Season 2. But you’re gonna have to wait a little bit. So, in the meantime, watch Season 1 again. You might discover there’s a whole season’s worth of other stuff you didn’t even notice the first time.

Season 1 of Long Story short is now streaming on Netflix