Is This the Next Great Jewish American Comedy?

BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg returns to streaming with a series about a family not not like his own.

- Rebecca Alter

RAPHAEL BOB-WAKSBERG and his editor, Brian Swanson, were discussing how to make egg salad in a way that accommodated both the laws of animation and Halakah. It was a March afternoon in Beverly Grove, and they were at the “radioplay” stage of Bob-Waksberg’s new animated series, Long Story Short, when a rough cut of an episode plays out in audio and they have to decide which jokes to cut and which takes to use. In this episode, one of the main characters, 20-something Yoshi (Max Greenfield), is staying at a Modern Orthodox family’s house in Los Angeles and chatting with the father, who offers to make him egg salad. “Would they use a refrigerator?” Swanson asked. Bob-Waksberg pondered. “It’s not Shabbat yet. Where else would they keep the eggs?”

Long Story Short is Bob-Waksberg’s first TV project since the end of BoJack Horseman, the first-ever adult animated Netflix show, which debuted at a time when you could count Netflix original series on one hand. “I was 29 when I sold it, and it came out the week of my 30th birthday,” says Bob-Waksberg. “Within one month, I turned 30, my first show premiered, and I met the woman who became my wife.

It was a very eventful August.” The dark Hollywood satire and character study about a washed-up horse actor and the people he's damaged was unlike anything else on TV in 2014. There was a disarming silliness to its world of humans and anthropomorphic animals working in showbiz; sight gags and wordplay abounded. But it was also deeply ambitious in its storytelling, tackling topics like addiction, generational trauma, and sexual assault with an emotional clarity that made it one of the best-regarded series of the decade.

It’s a show that continues to inspire passionate, enduring fandom. After the radioplay egg debate, actor Aaron Paul, who voiced Todd Chavez on