At last, a show that does for Jewish families what BoJack Horseman did for washed-up sitcom stars. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Long Story Short might not be what you’d expect from the creator of animation history’s most self-loathing equine—in fact, there are no horses at all, although a pack of (non-talking) wolves do make a key appearance. But he’s 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’s 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’s 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’s 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’s both at the same time: The exchange Avi has with his stern, relentlessly needy mother (Lisa Edelstein) about “the Haim girls” is a silly aside that also emerges as one of the few affectionate conversations we ever see them have.
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’s far more melancholy than a typical network sitcom, and while Jewish family life is embedded in the origins of the format, it’s rare that a major show is quite so explicit about or insistent on its characters’ 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’s still learning. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Sam Adams: You’ve said that being Jewish has informed everything you’ve done—that BoJack Horseman, for example, was about teshuvah. But Long Story Short is obviously much more textually about the subject. What brought you to tell this kind of story now?
Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Well, I was running out of other things to talk about, and you’ve got to keep the lights on. I think part of it was I’m getting older, I have kids of my own now, and so I’m thinking about my identity and what I want to pass on to my kids, or not. I’m 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.
The show is arriving at a point when a lot of American Jews, at least, are struggling with what that means.
I think that’s always simmering under the surface, but I won’t challenge your premise of “now more than ever.” It’s 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’re including and what we’re not talking about—not 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.
Your mother once told a reporter, “I’m delighted to be known as Raphael’s mother, as long as people don’t think BoJack’s mother is based on me.” That’s 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’s parents, they’re also much closer to you—not just because they’re human, but in ways like the fact that the children’s last name, Schwooper, is an amalgam of their parents’ Schwartz and Cooper, which isn’t 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?
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’ve been afraid of, that people in her life might be like, “Did you say that to your son?” Strangers thinking that’s my real mom is less of a concern for her.
When the did the time-jump aspect become a part of the show, and what do you like about that device?
Very early. I think that was part of the original idea of the show. I’d been talking to a friend of mine, Kate Purdy, who I made Undone with, and she got me this book by Chris Ware, Building Stories, and she told me, “You’re going to love this.” I was like, “All right, there’s a lot of books I’m ‘going to love.’ We’ll see.” 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 is a similar thing, in that it’s not always about the milestones. We’re just checking in with these people at different points.
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’m 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’d spent 100 episodes with this family. We’ll see if that experiment works or not.
This isn’t a puzzle show where the time jumps always serve to unlock some mystery about the characters, although things also pay off that you’re not expecting to. I thought the reference to “the Great Passover Candy Debacle of 2002” was just a throwaway joke, until you brought it back seven episodes later.
We don’t 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—and that’s 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’s related to who in what ways, the information is there for you. But we didn’t want you to feel the first time watching that you’re missing out, or, I think that’s something that’s going to make me laugh in three episodes, but I don’t really get it now. I don’t want that to be the prevailing feeling as you’re watching the show, because that’s not a good time.
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’s daughter’s 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?
If you’re working in animation, but really if you’re working in television in general, it’s never going to be 100 percent true to life. On BoJack, I was so anxious about that from the beginning that I wanted it—and this is such a silly thing to say, because even my writing on the pilot was so goofy and cartoony—but I was like, “I want it to feel like it’s really Los Angeles and it’s really real.” Mike Hollingsworth was the supervising director, and he was the one who was like, “I’m going to throw a bunch of animal jokes into these transitions between scenes.” Looking back, it’s like, oh my God, that made the show. No one would’ve watched Episode 2 if not for some of those goofy gags.
I’ve created certain rules for myself about how Long Story Short operates and doesn’t 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’d do jokes like, “I’ve got all these spaghetti strainers, and I don’t remember why I got them, but I’m sure it’s going to pay off big.” That lampshading kind of stuff. In this show, we don’t do that. This is not a show that knows it’s a TV show.
When Shira and Kendra are looking at preschools, one of their potential choices is Altman Academy, and when she’s a teenager, Avi’s daughter, Hannah, says she’s “trying to do with photos what Robert Altman did with sound.” Altman is famous for pioneering overlapping dialogue in movies, and Long Story Short’s characters are constantly talking over each other, in a way the subtitles constantly struggle to keep up with. Can you talk about Altman’s influence on the show?
It’s actually a bit of a happy accident, honestly, because Altman Academy was something else, and the name didn’t clear. So we needed a name for a school, and there was a girl in my freshman dorm named Alex Altman. It’s also an alt for the school. And I totally forgot we name-checked Robert Altman in the next episode. I wouldn’t say he was a conscious influence.
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’re recording two people on the day and they’re talking over each other, you’ve got to be really careful that you’re picking up everything you need to hear.
But when you’re recording actors separately, you can control the volume, you can control the timing. There’s a lot of dual dialogue written in the script, and then even more in the editing; it was like, oh, she knows what he’s going to say. She doesn’t have to wait for him to finish this sentence before she starts. Let’s add more overlap there and keep that moving.
Speaking of voices, you spoke very candidly to my former Slate colleague Inkoo Kang in 2018 about the decision to cast Alison Brie as BoJack’s 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’m wondering how that new understanding of who is appropriate for what role played in who you cast this time.
I think the obvious read would be: Oh, this time he’s really crossing all his T’s and dotting his I’s. Or the more cynical read is: Oh, when it’s his people, he has to cast all Jews. But the truth is, I think it’s 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’t necessarily believe that every actor has to line up with their character that they’re playing in every way. Obviously not. Nobody could.
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, “Oh, that’s a little weird.” Or maybe they’re not quite nailing the pronunciation there, but it’s not that big of a deal. It’s annoying, but it’s OK. I hadn’t quite realized the ways in which this community and this kind of representation was different. I think the big lesson was just we’re not all the same. On this show we have non-Jews playing Jews too.
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’t feel authentically Vietnamese. And that wasn’t because of Alison’s 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’ve told otherwise.
Long Story Short isn’t autobiographical, so none of the characters are you. But you’ve 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’ve even got a non-Jewish character from outside the family who converts. So I’m wondering, is there a character whose relationship to their Jewishness, or specifically their faith, feels closest to your own?
That’s a good question. Yes. But I don’t know if I should say it.
OK.
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’t know if there is one specifically.
In “Hannah’s Dance Recital,” you have a running gag about how all the other students’ dances are scored to increasingly absurd parodies of Christmas songs, including one that is essentially “Monster Mash.” What was the process of writing those songs like, and is there one you hope will enter the canon for real?
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’t realize how enveloping it is. I’ve had conversations with people who’ll be like, “Well, I’m not a Christian, but Christmas is for everybody.” But it’s not for you if that’s not how you grew up. It’s not for me. I’m 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’s really like, Whoa, I am not a part of this, and I’m 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’t even clocking how Christmassy it is, but it is very explicitly Christmassy and Christian.
You have that line about how, sure, other faiths are fine—like, you can stay.
“Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, too: We tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas.” That’s the subtext of a lot of it.
I’ll see if I can bust that out at the family Christmas party this year.
We just did these little snippets, but we’ve got to write full-length versions of these songs. We should put out a full album.
