--- name: "Raphael Bob-Waksberg" canonical: "https://film.one/person/raphael-bob-waksberg" roles: ["Creator","Writer"] born: "17 August 1984" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T02:47:15.031568+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Raphael Bob-Waksberg Creator and writer. Born 17 August 1984 in San Mateo, California, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Creator, Writer - **Born:** 17 August 1984, San Mateo, California, USA ## Fi1m on Raphael Bob-Waksberg > Bob-Waksberg makes cartoons that are silly on the surface and unsparing underneath. *BoJack Horseman* is the best case for what he does: a horse with a drink problem, animal puns in the background and no forgiveness anywhere. The first episode of *BoJack Horseman* (2014) puts its hero alone on a sofa in a house above Los Angeles, a drink in his hand, watching repeats of the 1990s sitcom that made him famous. He is a horse. Half the city are animals with human jobs and human debts, and nobody mentions it. The joke and the sadness sit in the same shot, and that shot is Bob-Waksberg's whole method. Everything he has made since is a variation on it. He came out of sketch comedy, and it shows in the density of the gags, most of them in the background where you have to look for them. *BoJack Horseman* ran six seasons and 76 episodes, from 2014 to 2020, and for about six of those episodes it looks like showbiz satire with a gimmick. Then it turns into something else and stays there. With Kate Purdy he co-created *Undone* (2019), a rotoscoped drama about time, memory and a family's damage; he wrote for and produced *Tuca & Bertie* (2019), about female friendship and adult life; and in 2025 he made *Long Story Short*, a Jewish family saga told across decades and out of order. The method is that silliness buys permission. "The brighter and the sillier and the cartoonier we went, the more the audience was willing to go with us to these very melancholy places," he said in 2020, and *BoJack* proves it. Lisa Hanawalt, who designed the show, drew the animals so that the silliness is always in frame, even when the scene is not funny at all. Here is what we felt. More than once an episode ended and we sat through the closing song without moving, because the last scene had shown BoJack doing the exact thing he had spent twenty minutes promising not to do, and the writers, Bob-Waksberg, Purdy, Joanna Calo and the rest, had declined to explain it or forgive it. Comedies about awful men usually love them a little too much. This one keeps counting the damage. The weakness is the flip side. When the cartoon is thin, the melancholy has nothing to hold on to, and the recurring complaint about *Undone*, which we have not reviewed, is that it gets bogged down in exposition and repeats itself. Even *BoJack* takes six episodes to become itself. *Long Story Short* is the test. Bob-Waksberg has taken the horse away and kept the sadness, and it will be worth finding out whether the grown-ups on his new sofa can carry it on their own. ## Biography Raphael Bob-Waksberg is an American writer, producer and comedian. Born on 17 August 1984 in San Mateo, California, he studied theatre and performance at Bard College, graduating in 2006. He began his career performing and writing with the Olde English comedy troupe. He is best known as the creator and showrunner of the Netflix animated series *BoJack Horseman* (2014–2020). With Kate Purdy he co-created the Amazon Prime Video series *Undone* (2019–2022). He also served as executive producer and writer on the Netflix series *Tuca & Bertie* (2019–2022), created by his frequent collaborator Lisa Hanawalt, and created the Netflix series *Long Story Short* (2025–present). Bob-Waksberg wrote the short-story collection *Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory*, published in 2019. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *BoJack Horseman* (2014), Fi1m 91, Creator, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/bojack-horseman.md) ## Also known for - *Undone* (2019), Writer - *Tuca & Bertie* (2019), Teleplay, Writer - *Long Story Short* (2025), Writer --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/raphael-bob-waksberg