Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg shares how continuity, collaboration, and precision helped turn tiny visual choices into emotional storytelling on his animated family comedy; now streaming on Netflix.
Creating a show whose episodes and storylines are not in chronological order—with major time jumps and flashbacks, and a large cast of characters who have to be designed at various ages—might cause some directors to run in the opposite direction. But not Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator and showrunner for Netflix’s Long Story Short.
“During the height of the pandemic, when everything was being done on Zoom, we were shooting an episode of Undone that I had to be on call for, while at the same time there was a meeting for Tuca and Bertie,” remembers Bob-Waksberg, also known for creating the highly acclaimed series BoJack Horseman. “I literally had two laptops open at the same time, with me muted, popping in and out of each call. But I felt like I did a good job producing both those shows. So, I could do this.”
Long Story Short, which debuted on the streamer in August and is now gearing up for its second season, follows the Schwoopers, a middle-class Jewish family. The show’s main characters are siblings Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and Yoshi (Max Greenfield), and the episodes move from childhood to adulthood and back again, chronicling their triumphs, disappointments, joys, and many compromises. Tornante Television serves as the production studio with ShadowMachine handling the animation.
Check out the trailer:
And a special behind-the-scenes look at the production:
Bob-Waksberg says Long Story Short’s episodes unfold the way someone with Attention Deficit Disorder, like Bob-Waksberg himself, might retell family stories to a therapist. Unsurprisingly, continuity has been a bear on this show, which was renewed for a second season a month before the first season premiered. It’s now in line for Emmy nomination consideration.
“We have a timeline and a family tree, and we have to keep track of stuff we’ve established on the show, as well as the stuff we haven’t even established yet,” says Bob-Waksberg. “Like, we have to know when the characters got married and what their birthdays are, even if we haven’t been clear about it in the show, so we know whether they need to have their wedding rings on in certain episodes. Kendra’s hairstyle is always changing, so we have to keep track of that, and how old the family dog is. Luckily, we have an incredible script coordinator, Scout Comm, who is really great at keeping track of things for us. I’ll get an email back from Scout after a script goes out saying, ‘This ad campaign you’re referencing wasn’t around yet,’ or ‘You already named a character this. Do you want to rename this character?’”
He adds, “That’s why every detail has to feel deliberate.”
That includes details as commonplace as character noses.
“Thinking about these characters as a family, and the ways they resemble each other—like deciding how one character gets this nose from one parent and this hair from the other, and mixing and matching those things—was really fun for Lisa,” says Bob-Waksberg, referring to supervising producer Lisa Hanawalt, who also helped define the look of the show alongside Alison Dubois. “Families come in all types, and not every family has physical resemblances or genetic relations. But it felt like an important way to visualize this specific family—the connections they have and their inability to escape each other, since those ties are literally part of their faces.”
Bob-Waksberg says Long Story Short follows the “show-don’t-tell” rule more than any other show he’s produced, and it’s not just the characters’ facial features that carry multiple meanings.
“There’s a moment in the dance recital episode where Avi and Shira are coming out of this big fight, and they start to move toward each other,” recalls Bob-Waksberg. “It feels like they’re going to hug, but instead they just walk right past each other. It’s such a powerful moment because of what it doesn’t show. You don’t even realize you’re expecting it until they walk right past each other, and it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, that feels weird.’ That was not written in as a moment in the script. The animators just realized they could play with that moment and make something cool. And I really love the moment in the ‘wolf situation’ episode where Hanna is sitting in the car watching her parents, closing one eye and opening the other as she puts a thumb up to cover her dad and then her mom. That visual also says a lot.”
But the most special aspect of Long Story Short, which draws so much on Bob-Waksberg’s own experiences growing up in a Jewish family, is, in the showrunner’s opinion, its ability to let everyone on the production team put a piece of themselves into the series.
“The joy of the show is in the collaboration,” he says. “I have a lot of trust in these people, some of whom I go back with 30 years and others I met just recently because of this show. But regardless of how long I’d known someone, I’d tell them, ‘You own a little piece of this show now. So, what do you got?’ What makes the show feel so special is that everyone takes ownership of it and adds their own thing. One of our writers’ assistants was really into defining the astrological signs of all the characters. And I was like, ‘I don’t care about this at all. But go nuts.’ But it sparked a lot of ideas for our writers. And I think Lisa Edelstein even channeled her own mother when she came up with Naomi’s New York voice.”
As more crew members incorporated their own ideas—behaviors they recognized from their children and dynamics within their extended families—into the show, Long Story Short became a colorful quilt of diverse family histories.
“We knew we wanted the show to be full of color because that’s Lisa [Hanawalt]’s style, and I think she very smartly saw that the more muted the emotions, the more you want the colors to contrast with them,” notes Bob-Waksberg. “You don’t want this to feel like a gray and drab show. Even if characters are sitting around a kitchen table talking about their gray and beige feelings, you want the colors to feel almost opposite—something that keeps people tuning in to those conversations.”
The show is also an amalgam of not just the Jewish family experience, but the experience of almost any family that knows what it’s like to fight with siblings, talk over one another at the dinner table, and try to get grandma to censor her stories about the wild times with grandpa.
“What was really important to me to include was the way they all talk over each other and don’t wait for somebody else to finish a sentence,” shares Bob-Waksberg. “If you know what your parent or sibling is going to say before they say it, you’re responding before they get the chance to finish. Or even two conversations can be happening at once. The ease with which this family communicates—how they all speak the same language and share the same running jokes—felt so specific and real. We bring a lot of jokes back because we want the audience to start to recognize those patterns within the family.”
Funnily enough, the layered dialogue wasn’t a challenge in the recording booth, even with the actors recording their lines separately. The real challenge came when the editors had to splice the audio together in a truly artistic and imaginative way.
“It was actually really helpful that we did this in animation,” says Bob-Waksberg. “In animation, you can raise the volume of certain people and certain words at certain times—sometimes by mere milliseconds—to get a better sense of what’s going on in the scene. We can make things overlap at the exact right time. Our editors were so precise and thoughtful about those scenes.”
Both the visuals and the dialogue of Long Story Short speak to why the show couldn’t have been made in live-action while maintaining the same emotional range and impressionistic impact.
“Animation can syringe things straight to the heart in a way that live-action can’t,” says Bob-Waksberg. “That’s one of the things I love about it. And hopefully others do too. We already got a Season 2, so hopefully a Season 3 isn’t too far away.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
