Five years after the end of Bojack Horseman, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg is back with Long Story Short, an animated, decade-spanning comedy centered on a dysfunctional Jewish family.
Lisa Edelstein, Paul Reiser, Ben Feldman, Abbi Jacobson, Max Greenfield, Angelique Cabral and Nicole Byer make up the voice cast, and at the show’s Los Angeles premiere on Monday, the stars discussed how it felt to be releasing the show amid the war in Gaza and the surrounding Israel-Palestine discourse.
“I couldn’t believe that something like this was being made, I couldn’t believe something this specifically Jewish was being made,” Feldman, who voices the oldest child of the show’s Schwooper family, told The Hollywood Reporter. And now with the series about to release, the actor admitted to feeling “timid” but “Honestly bring it. There’s going to be vitriol; there was an article this morning that was just a think piece on the show and I stupidly read the first comments. People are feeling very passionate right now and they deserve to be and I understand why. But sometimes their ire and vitriol is misdirected.”
“I think there are plenty of Instagrams to scream on in the comment section, I don’t think a D-list actor on a sitcom is one of them,” he continued. “We’re not saving the world, but I understand this is a fiery, dangerous subject and something about that is really interesting to me.”
Jacobson — who voices the family’s middle child — noted, “I’m really excited to be a part of this show and I love being Jewish. I love representing a Jewish family and I think that this is doing it in a very specific way during a very difficult time,” and Edelstein — who plays the family matriarch — added, “The timing is amazing. I’m really grateful and it’s really important. I really appreciate playing Jewish characters, especially right now.”
For his part, Bob-Waksberg said he “feels great” about debuting his show in this moment; though the story takes place over decades, it only goes up until 2022 — a year before the Oct. 7 attack — and does not mention Israel, which the creator told Vulture is “because the Jewish experience is so much more interesting than that.” He expressed being open to the topic in future seasons, though, saying, “I don’t want to create any content that is then going to make people want to boycott this show in either direction. We will have to get into that at some point. I want to do it in a way that makes sense for our show, that doesn’t feel didactic, that doesn’t feel like scoring points.”
One thing fans can expect is the same balance between comedy and gut-punching emotion that Bojack Horseman was known for, as Bob-Waksberg teased, “This show is going to make you laugh, it’s going to make you cry, it’s going to make you sweat, it’s going to make you bleed, it’s going to make you sneeze; all sort of things are going to be coming out of all sorts of holes in your body.”
Greenfield said some expectations are going to come with the show because of Bob-Waksberg’s resumé, and “in my opinion, it’s lived up to all of them, it really is so special… It’s an animated show and so much of the tone of it really catches you off guard and takes you to places you don’t expect. And within all of that, it’s hilarious.”
Feldman threw out the possibility of the new series being even more emotional than Bojack, which “lets you off the hook every once in a while; there’s just zanier things and it’s also about celebrity which everybody is ready to laugh at anyway, and they’re animals. And on this show it’s family and everyone to some degree has family.”
Long Story Short starts streaming Friday on Netflix.
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