Some stories practically beg to be animated.
BoJack Horseman — a sardonic look at fame through the eyes of a washed-up actor who happens to be a horse — just wouldn’t have been the same with an actor in a mask. Across six seasons (2014–20), Raphael Bob-Waksberg turned that bizarre premise into a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated cult hit. But his new show, Long Story Short, trades talking animals for something more grounded: the ups and downs of a Jewish family over several decades.
So, animation or live action? For Bob-Waksberg, the answer was always clear. “Animation puts the viewer’s brain in a different space,” he says. “On some level, it puts you back in childhood and allows you to feel things more freely than live action does. You let your guard down, and it puts you in a more vulnerable place. It makes you more open to things. As a creator, that’s fun to play around with.”
Long Story Short follows the three Schwooper siblings and their parents — Naomi Schwartz and Elliott Cooper — from the 1990s to the present, bouncing around in time as the family deals with funerals, bar mitzvahs and other events, both celebratory and tragic, often at the same time. It’s Bob-Waksberg’s fourth animated show (his third with Netflix), and if you’re a fan of BoJack’s very specific tone, you’ll appreciate Long Story Short, which also alternates smoothly between extremes.
“One thing that surprised me as we did BoJack is that the more silly we went, the more serious we could go,” he says. “And rather than feeling tonal whiplash, the two flavors complemented each other, like salted caramel.”
The new series, premiering August 22, stars Lisa Edelstein (House) and Paul Reiser (Mad About You) as the parents, with Ben Feldman (Superstore), Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Max Greenfield (Running Point) as their kids. Bob-Waksberg reteamed with casting director Linda Lamontagne, who’s worked on all his shows, to ensure the ensemble achieved a family feel.
When actors came in to read, “We didn’t call them auditions, but we recorded people, because we wanted to do chemistry tests,” he says. “We wanted to hear how they played off each other. These are all actors who don’t need to audition ever again, but they were happy to come in and talk to me about it, and talk about the character and talk about the show. Then, at the first table read, we all came together, and it was electric. You could really feel, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a chemistry here. This is exciting.’”
Long Story Short is now streaming on Netflix.
The full version of this article can be found in emmy Magazine, issue #10, 2025, under the title "Family Affairs."
