Although, at that moment, “Long Story Short” creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg was receiving the Spark Award at IndieWire Honors, he began his acceptance speech by saying, “The truth is I feel like a failure a lot of the time.”
The two-time Emmy nominee for Outstanding Animated Program, who after the success of his first Netflix series “BoJack Horseman” is back at the streaming service with a more human story about the Schwooper family, used his time on stage to allude to some of the professional challenges in between.
“A lot of this business is you pour your full heart into something and then a man in a room whose boss is a spreadsheet tells you the numbers don’t look good. Maybe your full heart wasn’t enough or too much or just the wrong kind. You imagine worlds filled with characters that you fill with backstories and hopes, dreams, fears, anxieties, relationships, all snuffed out with a phone call. ‘They love you, but the network is passing,’” he said. “You write a movie about a rock band, you write songs for the rock band, you sing them in the shower, you picture your song being performed at the Oscars. The script never even goes to the studios. The producer thinks it isn’t ready. She’s probably right.”
The creator of the show IndieWire ranked as the Best TV Series of 2025 added, “As artists, we dream about moments like this where we are recognized for our brilliance, originality, bravery. But the truth is that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our moments are so the opposite of this.”
Ultimately, to account for how few and far between recognition like awards can be for working artists, Bob-Waksberg arrived at his thesis. “We have to find meaning in the work itself,” he said. “We have to be sustained and enriched by the act of creation while knowing full well that act might be all that it ever is.”
Bob-Waksberg is grateful for the act of simply creating “Long Story Short,” and he closed his speech by saying, “I still find the work to be thrilling, surprising, new. I still sing my songs in the shower and sometimes if you’re very, very lucky, you get to collaborate with a group of like-minded weirdos on something that means something to you, and you sneak it past the gatekeepers and the algorithms and somebody somewhere tells you that it also means something to them, and that’s pretty nice, too.”
This season’s IndieWire Honors ceremony took place Thursday, June 4, in Los Angeles with an intimate cocktail reception and ceremony. Stay tuned for more exclusive editorial and social content from the night, including video interviews, outtakes, and more.
You can watch Bob-Waksberg’s full speech in the video above.
