Raphael Bob-Waksberg has written a lot about family grief. His psychedelic series Undone follows a young woman seeing visions of her dead father, and one of the best episodes of his Netflix show BoJack Horseman consists entirely of a 26-minute-long monologue, which the title character delivers about his dead mother. Death also looms large over Bob-Waksberg’s new Netflix series Long Story Short, which opens in 1996 with a family, the Schwoopers, driving home after a funeral.
“Grief is interesting and scary, and I’m interested in writing about the things that scare me personally,” Bob-Waksberg tells Polygon over Zoom. “It takes away some of the power of those fears, but I also think it’s a healthy, cathartic way for me to explore those fears.”
Long Story Short, which premiered on Aug. 22 and has already been renewed for another season, consists of 10 episodes that jump back and forth through the decades and alternate between the perspectives of a large cast of characters, exploring the lives of a middle-class Jewish family from California. Bob-Waksberg uses this disjointed structure to plant small moments in the characters’ past that gain significance when we see them again years or even decades later.
For example, in a scene in the series premiere set in 2004, aspiring music critic Avi Schwooper (Ben Feldman) explains to his girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) that he loves Paul Simon’s 1990 song “The Obvious Child” because of the melancholy way the song portrays the rapid passage of time. A scene with the couple happily listening to music together transitions to Avi listening to the song alone in his car, decades later. It’s a heartbreaking way to emphasize the show’s central point: Time marches on, and it is rarely kind.
Long Story Short’s format means it skips over plenty of years, but Bob-Waksberg also sought to process his fears by focusing on the impact of COVID-19. It looms large in the sections of Long Story Short set in 2021 and 2022. The pandemic’s death toll is personal for the Schwoopers, but it’s also a way to explore the politics of masking and indoor gatherings.
“COVID is a thing that happened to us as a society, and I have this fear that we’re going to forget,” Bob-Waksberg says. “It feels like we’re still kind of in the phase of Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen and move on, which scares me. All of us grew up at a time when there was still a living memory of the Holocaust, and we had old people come to our schools and talk to us about it. I remember when AIDS was such an all-encompassing thing, and as you grow older, you see those things kind of fall off the edge of memory. The fact that it already feels like it’s happening with COVID, I find scary.”
“If you like to cry, this is the show for you. If you like to laugh, this is the show for you.”
The show portrays online learning during the pandemic as so awful and pointless that Avi and Jen’s daughter Hannah (Michaela Dietz) would rather go to a school that’s literally infested by a pack of wolves. This episode, which pokes fun at helicopter parents while exploring Hannah’s struggle to socialize, demonstrates the same impressive mix of seriousness and irreverence that allowed BoJack Horseman to memorably interrogate heavy issues like addiction, gun violence, and abortion.
“We had [BoJack Horseman] fans who loved the comedy and didn’t care for the drama, and we had fans who loved the drama and didn’t think it was funny at all,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I think that’s true on this show as well. There are people who are going to find different ways into it. If you like to cry, this is the show for you. If you like to laugh, this is the show for you. There’s something for everybody.”
Long Story Short offers plenty of humor with bite via the Schwooper family’s various fights, mixing passive-aggressive barbs with attempts to reconcile over the shared joys and pain that bring them together. Yoshi (Max Greenfield), the youngest of the Schwooper clan, provides a brand of absurdist comedy similar to BoJack’s roommate Todd Chavez as he searches for purpose by getting embroiled in zany plots like selling mattresses in tubes.
“You’re revealing the old tropes that I rely on,” Bob-Waksberg says. “There are some ways in which both Todd and Yoshi are very personal to me. I have a bit of the old ADD myself, so it is very cathartic to express it through these characters.”
While Yoshi’s humor is broad, other Long Story Short gags are highly specific, incorporating Yiddish terms, along with references to Jewish religion and customs. I found the jokes about Jewish mourning rituals and mixing up meat and dairy plates so hilarious that I want my whole family to watch the series, but I wonder how people who didn’t grow up Jewish would respond. Bob-Waksberg says BoJack Horseman’s success taught him not to worry whether people get his humor.
“On BoJack, there are lots of jokes about the differences between an agent and a manager, and points on the back end, and references to very specific celebrities and inside-Hollywood culture, and we have fans all over the world who don’t understand any of that stuff,” he says. “My guiding light has always been ‘Be specific and be honest, and through that specificity you find universality.’”
That specificity also helped the show’s cast relate to their characters. Abbi Jacobson, who plays the middle Schwooper sibling, Shira, previously explored her Jewish identity as the star and co-creator of Broad City.
“This is a very easy and lovely job for me,” Jacobson says. “I am obviously so invested in Shira, and I feel a deep connection with her, even if there are big differences.”
Ben Feldman, who plays the eldest Schwooper sibling, Ari, initially didn’t want to say what parts of the dysfunctional Schwooper family he found relatable, but admits he found parallels in the ways the characters talk to each other, and in the family’s overbearing and hypercritical matriarch, Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein).
“I think Lisa Edelstein has nailed every legal guardian I’ve ever had,” Feldman says. “I’m very interested to see my family watch this show and [see] what they relate to, and what they think is just crazy cartoon stuff because it’s about them.”
Season 1 of Long Story Short ends with another funeral and a heap of Schwooper antics — Yoshi gets into trouble chasing a cat through a casino, while Shira carries an ear of corn around as an act of petty revenge. But as they share the pain of their most recent loss and the older wounds that still haven’t healed, the Schwoopers look toward the future and hope for happier reunions. Bob-Waksberg wouldn’t tell me what he has planned for the show’s second season, but the rich characters and clever format promise plenty of opportunities to keep exploring where the Schwoopers have already been, and how they’ll move forward together.
Long Story Short is now streaming on Netflix.
