--- title: Why the Creator of BoJack Horseman Made a Very Jewish New Show description: Netflix's 'Long Story Short' is a nuanced depiction of a Jewish family, but its creator says he intends for it to be 'broadly appealing.' canonical: https://time.com/7310698/long-story-short-netflix-raphael-bob-waksberg-interview/ author: Esther Zuckerman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-08-22T12:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:50:51.418Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Why the Creator of BoJack Horseman Made a Very Jewish New Show og:description: Netflix's 'Long Story Short' is a nuanced depiction of a Jewish family, but its creator says he intends for it to be 'broadly appealing.' og:url: https://time.com/7310698/long-story-short-netflix-raphael-bob-waksberg-interview/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcc9fcedf77ce1282/6998c91783ec370f83c7adae/Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why the Creator of BoJack Horseman Made a Very Jewish New Show twitter:description: Netflix's 'Long Story Short' is a nuanced depiction of a Jewish family, but its creator says he intends for it to be 'broadly appealing.' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcc9fcedf77ce1282/6998c91783ec370f83c7adae/Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why the Creator of _BoJack Horseman_ Made a Very Jewish New Show by [Esther Zuckerman](https://time.com/author/esther-zuckerman/) ## Esther Zuckerman Zuckerman is a contributor for TIME. Aug 22, 2025 12:00 PM UTC  The Schwooper children: Abbi Jacobson as Shira, Ben Feldman as Avi and Max Greenfield as Yoshi in Long Story Short. The Schwooper children: Abbi Jacobson as Shira, Ben Feldman as Avi and Max Greenfield as Yoshi in Long Story Short.Courtesy of Netflix by [Esther Zuckerman](https://time.com/author/esther-zuckerman/) ## Esther Zuckerman Zuckerman is a contributor for TIME. Aug 22, 2025 12:00 PM UTC [Raphael Bob-Waksberg](https://time.com/5677315/undone-interview-bojack-horseman/) understands he's tapped into an incredibly nuanced, incredibly recognizable to anyone-in-the-know depiction of [Jewish American identity](https://time.com/7011581/between-the-temples-jewish-movies/) with his new [animated Netflix series](https://time.com/5752400/adult-animation-golden-age/) _Long Story Short_. "There is a specificity here that I don't know if it would read to non-Jews," he says during a Zoom call in July. "I do feel like I'm doing something special here, but I'm not quite sure how to explain it." But Bob-Waksberg, best known as the creator of [_BoJack Horseman_](https://time.com/5782922/bojack-horseman-title-sequence/), is also worried he's underselling the show. "But also broadly appealing, let's be clear," he says with a laugh. "It's not _so_ niche." _Long Story Short_, which drops its entire first season on Aug. 22,jumps around in time to paint a portrait of the Schwoopers, the children of Naomi Schwartz (voiced by Lisa Edelstein) and Elliott Cooper (Paul Reiser). The hybrid last name is an indication of the Boomer-hippie tendencies of these parents, who have raised music-obsessed nebbish Avi (Ben Feldman), intense lesbian Shira ([Abbi Jacobson](https://time.com/7201121/no-good-deed-netflix-ending-explained/)), and burnout lost soul Yoshi ([Max Greenfield](https://time.com/7260380/running-point-review-netflix/)).  The Schwooper family Courtesy of Netflix Unlike Bob-Waksberg's previous Netflix hit, the characters in the series are not anthropomorphic animals. They are very much human, and supervising producer and longtime Bob-Waksberg collaborator [Lisa Hanawalt](https://time.com/5587218/lisa-hanawalt-tuca-and-bertie/) rendered them in designs that feel inviting and almost scrawled onto the screen. The 10 episodes are presented chronologically out of order, spanning from the early 2000s through (nearly) the present day, and chronicle the Schwoopers' loves and losses. The COVID-19 pandemic figures heavily—"It does feel like now pop culture has created this weird vacuum around it where we are not talking about it," Bob-Waksberg says. But the series also, mind you, is animated (not just in the literal sense of the word) and incredibly funny: Yoshi starts selling mattresses whose ostensible selling point is that they explode out of their packaging; Avi hunts down wolves; Shira goes nuts making knishes to impress a potential school for her kids; Elliott is obsessed with a hot tub. While Bob-Waksberg has a glib answer about how the idea for the show came to him—he needed [another project](https://time.com/5672110/undone-amazon-review/) to keep his assistant after _BoJack_ [ended](https://time.com/5706156/bojack-horseman-season-6-review/) its [six-season run](https://time.com/5774893/bojack-horseman-finale-recap-review/) in 2020—the more earnest answer is that it arose from his own experience of becoming a father. "I was thinking about family in different ways, and thinking about time, and identity, which in my case is 'Jewish American,' but also 'son' and 'brother' and 'husband' and 'father' now." Though the show is not specifically about his own family, he was considering just what he wanted to pass down knowing full well that, "In 20 years my kids are going to have a list of stuff that I did wrong even though I'm trying my best." From the beginning, Bob-Waskberg had the idea that the series was going to hop around in the timeline of the Schwoopers. In the premiere episode, college-age Avi is bringing his new girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) to Yoshi's Bar Mitzvah. In the next, Avi and Jen are married with a young child and Shira is asking to use his sperm to artificially inseminate her partner Kendra (Nicole Byer).  Kendra asks Avi for the gift of his sperm Courtesy of Netflix "The theme for me from the beginning was time and watching these characters age and grow, and thinking about the ways in which things from our youth affect us in the present," he says. The Schwoopers are also specific in their depiction as Conservative Jews, who were raised to keep Kosher in the household and are serious about Jewish traditions. Though their habits diverge over time—Avi decides to raise his child without faith, for instance—that upbringing infuses the way in which they go about their lives. "I wanted to show Jews that are _Jews_ that do all the Jewish stuff," Bob-Waksberg says. "They are not secular, they're not Jewish in culture only. But it's not about believing in God necessarily or grappling with faith. It's about grappling with religion, which is different." _Long Story Short_ is not a comprehensive picture of what it is like to be Jewish today; that’s too great an expectation to put on any one piece of culture. You can imagine the arguments the Schwoopers might have about Israel, for instance, but those do not happen on screen. That was a conscious choice. "It is a [part of being Jewish](https://time.com/6333456/jewish-students-college-antisemitism-essay/), absolutely, but it felt like in this moment even a small conversation about that could upstage everything we wanted to do," Bob-Waksberg says. "We didn't want to create something that could be a headline for people who didn't watch the show." The topic, however, isn't off the table for the future, he adds, and after we speak _Long Story Short_ is renewed for a second season ahead of its premiere, a clear sign of [Netflix’s](https://time.com/7305470/new-on-netflix-august-2025/) confidence in what it has in hand, and a reinforcement of Bob-Waksberg’s assertion that the show is not _so_ niche. This isn't to say that _Long Story Short_ won't [engender debates](https://time.com/6329962/israel-hamas-personal-relationships-strain-us/) among Jewish viewers. Bob-Waksberg enjoys playing with archetypes and specifically does so here with Naomi, who at first appears to be an overly familiar overbearing Jewish mother, but whose inner life deepens as the series progresses.  Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), Jen (Angelique Cabral), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) Courtesy of Netflix "There was a certain amount of trepidation with this character of not wanting her to feel like a stereotype or a cliche, but also not wanting to shy away from the archetype either and not wanting to create this WASP-y mother that did not feel Jewish at all," he says. "There was a little bit of, ‘F-ck it, let's do it.’ Let's let it happen and fully investigate it, but then I felt the responsibility of \[wanting\] her to feel like a fully dimensional character." But for all this talk of how Jewish _Long Story Short_ is—and it is very Jewish—Bob-Waksberg thinks it can reach even those who might not get all the jokes about shiva and Shabbat. "I never want to underestimate an audience's ability to attach themselves to a story that feels specific and true," he says. "You know, if I got people to do it about a talking horse, I think I can get people to do it about anybody else." ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7310698/long-story-short-netflix-raphael-bob-waksberg-interview/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7310698/long-story-short-netflix-raphael-bob-waksberg-interview/"},"headline":"Why the Creator of BoJack Horseman Made a Very Jewish New Show","datePublished":"2025-08-22T12:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:50:51.418Z","description":"Netflix's 'Long Story Short' is a nuanced depiction of a Jewish family, but its creator says he intends for it to be 'broadly appealing.'","url":"https://time.com/7310698/long-story-short-netflix-raphael-bob-waksberg-interview/","keywords":["Television","freelance","culturepod"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcc9fcedf77ce1282/6998c91783ec370f83c7adae/Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Esther Zuckerman","jobTitle":"Zuckerman is a contributor for TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/esther-zuckerman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcc9fcedf77ce1282/6998c91783ec370f83c7adae/Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Long_Story_Short_n_S1_00_22_46_17","caption":"Long Story Short (L to R) Abbi Jacobson as Shira Schwooper, Ben Feldman as Avi Schwooper and Max Greenfield as Yoshi Schwooper in Long Story Short. 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