[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Long Story Short” Season 1.
“Long Story Short” opens with the Schwooper siblings — neurotic eldest son Avi (Ben Feldman), sarcastic middle child Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and free-spirited youngest Yoshi (Max Greenfield) — in the backseat of their parents’ car, driving away from their grandmother’s funeral. In the final episode of the first season, a good 20+ years and another funeral later, the three come back together as adults with their loved ones to share their memories from that day. In between that opening scene in 1996 and the closing episode set in 2022, the show moves back and forth along the timeline, tackling life events both big and small in this trio’s lives, from bar mitzvahs and failed interventions to child dance recitals and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When we were writing Episode 1, we knew that we were going to come back to this in Episode 10,” Raphael Bob-Waksberg said in an interview with IndieWire. “I think a lot of the breaking of the season for me was just coming up with a lot of different kind of stories I wanted to tell, and then figuring out what’s the proper order for these, how am I going to bounce around and bounce through them? I liked the idea of feeling like we’ve gone on an emotional journey with these characters by the end of it, and coming back around to where we started. In a show like this, where you can go in any direction, and there isn’t like a linear narrative to it necessarily, I felt like that would make it feel whole and make the season feel complete.”
Bob-Waksberg came to prominence for “BoJack Horseman,” his acclaimed early Netflix hit — so early that the sheer concept of a Netflix Original was still something of a novelty upon its 2014 premiere. “Long Story Short” isn’t his followup exactly — he also did the similarly time-bending series “Undone” for Amazon Prime with Kate Purdy — but it’s his first for Netflix since “BoJack,” and features some creative overlap — most notably in Bob-Waksberg’s longtime childhood friend and “Tuca & Bertie” creator Lisa Hanawalt, who along with Allison Dubois designed the pleasing hand-drawn, graphic novel aesthetic for the series that he compares to “Peanuts” cartoons and the works of Chris Ware.
The story of a horse that’s also a washed-up sitcom actor, “Bojack Horseman” was a study in contrasts: It indulged in wacky, heightened humor, while also telling a dark and brutally realistic story of depression and addiction. “Long Story Short” certainly has traces of fantastical cartoon antics, and tackles heavy themes of family tension, grief, and aging. In practice though, the series feels completely separated from “BoJack” tonally, telling a more grounded story that exists somewhere in between that show’s two extremes.
“I wanted to focus the spectrum a little bit. BoJack was the whole range of colors, and on this show, I wanted to zoom in a little bit on this on this middle section, and go not quite as zany and cartoony and also not quite as bleak and Greek tragedy,” Bob-Waksberg said. “I wanted to feel more in the area of the real world, quote, unquote, and then fill that up, play the whole spectrum of that. Almost like on a cop show, you zoom in and then you enhance. I wanted to zoom in and enhance, and play all the notes of that octave.”
Each episode of “Long Story Short” is an example of that “zoom in and enhance” practice: While the series covers almost 30 years of time, each episode is — somewhat unusually for a Netflix binge release — a very self-contained tale. The installments all feature a cold open scene, generally but not always set in the childhood of the Schwooper siblings, before diving into a main story set in a different year, with the vignette usually having some direct or indirect relationship to the events at hand; a scene at the beach between Avi and Shira as kids opens an episode where the incident is discussed between them as adults, for example.
Bob-Waksberg referred to the framing device as an “appetizer” that keeps the episodes standalone while carrying the time-jumping format across the show. The episodes are then ordered so that, while they work on their own, they tell a coherent story throughout the season.
“It is more art than science, feeling what’s the proper order for these episodes. And we did want to be deliberate about the order. I mean, we didn’t want to be a thing where the show comes out and you get 100 articles like, ‘Watch this episode first,’” Bob-Waksberg said. “What’s the right way to watch this show? In order. Real easy for our audience. It’s not a choose your own adventure. Just start at the beginning and let it all wash over you.”
Running through the show and giving its basic structure is the kids’ relationship with their mother Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), which is strained and complex for all of them, especially Avi. Not every episode focuses on Naomi or even directly features her — the third episode “There’s a Mattress in There” is more centered on Yoshi’s relationship with their dad Elliot (Paul Reiser), while episodes like “Shira Can’t Cook” or “Wolves” are set after her death — but most of the siblings’ various hangups can be traced to Naomi’s strict parenting and high expectations for their children, and the last three episodes of the season foreground their dynamic.
Season 1 ends with a mild note of catharsis for the Schwoopers, as they reminisce about their mother and open up about the pain they feel now that she’s gone, but their feelings about her still remain painfully mixed — a lack of resolution Bob-Waksberg felt was deliberate: “I think one of the conversations within the show is that grief is a process, and that everybody attacks it differently, and it attacks everybody differently,” he said.
None of the show’s time-hopping structure would work if the characters weren’t well-formed and specific, and “Long Story Short” benefits from texture and details drawn partially from Bob-Waksberg’s own life, although he’s clear it’s not a show about his own family. He was inspired to make the series after having children of his own, which caused him to begin thinking of his own childhood, and the concepts of family traditions and peoples’ different identities as partners and parents and siblings.
Much like Bob-Waksberg himself, the Schwoopers are Jewish, and their heritage informs much of the show, from the shivas and Jewish Community Center galas the cast attends to the resentment toward his upbringing that propels much of Avi’s arc to the knishes that Shira spends an entire episode trying to make. Similarly, both Bob-Waksberg’s family and the Schwoopers are from Northern California, and the show derives a lot of flavor from its setting. According to Bob-Waksberg, the pilot initially didn’t have a set location, and the location was only set when Hanawalt designed the location with houses resembling those from their childhood.
“It allowed me to be very specific about the geography and thoughtful. The other writers in the room would sometimes make fun of me because they would pitch a story where Shira drives by to see Avi, and then goes back to see her parents and I said ‘No, geographically, that makes no sense, she wouldn’t drive from Oakland to Santa Rosa down to the South Bay,”” Bob-Waksberg said. “And they’re like, ‘OK, we don’t know. And no one’s gonna care about any of those.’ But to me, being true to that, and thinking about that specificity, I think, gives it a flavor.”
Another aspect of the show that lent authenticity was the casting. With the exception of Shira’s wife Kendra (Nicole Byer), whose conversion to Judaism forms the arc of a stellar spotlight episode, the majority of Jewish characters were voiced by Jewish actors. Bob-Waksberg is slightly ambivalent about the topic, referring to having the cast match the heritage of their characters as “important-ish,” but he also admits to having taken into account his experiences from “BoJack Horseman,” which attracted some controversy throughout its run for the casting of Alison Brie as the Vietnamese Diane.
“I don’t think that was a deal breaker, but I think it helps, and I also think it’s nice for them. I think a lot of them are happy to be playing these Jewish characters and to use this experience that they have had and they don’t always get to play,” Bob-Waksberg said. “I learned a lot from making ‘BoJack’ and the experience of not necessarily being as conscious on that show of the makeup of the cast versus the makeup of the characters. I don’t think there are hard and fast rules to it, but I think it helps.”
Although Season 1 of “Long Story Short” tells a relatively complete picture of this family and their relationships, it’s not the last time audiences have seen the Schwoopers. The series has already been renewed for a second season, and there are certainly key moments in the characters’ lives not yet portrayed on screen — Naomi’s death from COVID, which looms over the last episode in particular, and Avi’s divorce, most notably. Bob-Waksberg refers to these events as “cards to play later on,” although he also confesses an enjoyment to boomeranging the audience around the big moments to invest more in the family’s day-to-day lives. It’s also part of the reason for the show’s time-jumping format, allowing him and the writers to continue to surprise the audience with new stories about the family.
“It would take me too long to get to all I wanted to show,” Bob-Waksberg said. “If I started the project now and did it in chronological order, it would take me 15 seasons to get to some of the episodes.”
All 10 episodes of “Long Story Short” are now streaming on Netflix.
