Bob-Waksberg Returns to Netflix With 'Long Story Short'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Raphael Bob-Waksberg returns to Netflix with "Long Story Short," an animated series following the Jewish Schwooper family — parents Naomi and Elliot, and kids Avi, Shira and Yoshi — through different years and even decades.
- The show was designed to look distinct from Bob-Waksberg's prior collaborations "BoJack Horseman" and "Tuca & Bertie," with a hand-drawn feel; Lisa Hanawalt serves as supervising producer and production designer, and Alison Dubois as art director.
- Bob-Waksberg said he wanted to tell a story about religion that took Judaism seriously as community, culture, history, and family — not filtered through a Christian view where faith is the central point.
- Animation lets the series time-jump across decades with the same voice cast — avoiding "distracting prosthetics" — and enables surreal set pieces like wolves taking over parts of a school to explore parental rights.
- Season 2 is already completed, though Netflix has not announced a release date; Bob-Waksberg said he hopes for a Season 3 because "there's a lot of stories to be told with these characters."
- Bob-Waksberg said the show intentionally explores multiple perspectives and is not meant to be "a soapbox for one specific point of view."
Why it matters: Long Story Short marks Bob-Waksberg's first major series since BoJack Horseman ended, and the fact that Season 2 is already in the can signals Netflix's confidence in an auteur-driven animated project that trades broad comedy for time-jumping, emotionally specific family storytelling — including a notably rare on-screen treatment of Judaism that centers community and culture over faith.
