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Season 3 of Bluey, the beloved Australian children’s show streaming on Disney+, is about to drop. If you’ve been here for a while you know that I’m a fan. Bluey got me through a tough winter of a tough year, and last March I wrote an ode to Bluey and its restorative powers—yes, even and maybe especially for adults.
As Season 3 drops many media outlets are asking the now oft-posed question: “What is it about this Emmy-winning show about animated dogs?”
Not to brag, but ahem, I think I published the definitive answer to that question back in March—you can read on and feel free to agree or disagree :)
In honor of the Bluey Season 3 drop, I offer here a slightly updated and abridged version of that essay below. Happy Bluey watching, and if you have a new favorite episode, drop it in the comments!
Confession: I reached a point earlier this year where I started watching Bluey, the children’s show, without my toddler.
If you’re not familiar, Bluey is an Australian cartoon on Disney+ about a family of dogs (Blue Heelers): a mom named Chili; dad named Bandit; and their two daughters, Bingo and Bluey, roughly ages 4 and 6.
Like a lot of people since the show reached American audiences during the pandemic and became a hit here, I’ve been trying to pin down: What is it about this show?
For me, maybe it’s Bingo and Bluey’s perfect mirthful little-kid giggles and peals of high-pitched laughter.
Maybe it’s the Heelers’ house. It has charming turn-of-the-century details, a generous playroom, verandas, an enclosed sun deck, and a spacious yard. It’s situated on a hill surrounded by mature trees, and somehow has both city and nature views. It’s the kind of family home that is completely unattainable in the U.S. post-2019. (Btw, I learned that this is an iconic kind of architecture in Australia known as “Queenslander.”)
Maybe it’s that Chili, the mom (mum!), has my exact ideal family situation: she has two girls close in age, and a partner who does most of the childcare and housework and gamely engages in imaginative play with the children. Meanwhile, her job allows for ample family time and still pays for a Range Rover and the aforementioned dream house.
Maybe it’s because the show is so charmingly site-specific to Brisbane that the fruit bats, ibises, and jacaranda trees make it feel like it takes place in a dream space that is slightly otherworldly—and in the last couple years I sometimes find myself wanting to escape to somewhere that’s…not here.
(Yes, I have daydreamed about moving to Brisbane, based solely on watching Bluey. No, I have never been to Australia and couldn’t locate Brisbane on a map.)
I am not the first grown-up to try to put their finger on exactly what makes Bluey good. New York Magazine’s television critic deemed it “The Best Kids Show of Our Time.” It has its own write-up in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker. It has a 5-star rating on IMDB and dozens of nerdy Reddit threads dedicated to dissecting and debating what makes it great.
Everyone seems to agree that the show’s success is due to the fact that it’s funny to parents as well as kids, the same quality that has made Pixar films wildly popular. And many argue that the show’s secret is that it’s about play and childhood wonder, as many of the episodes center around imaginative games that the kids pull their parents into.
But I think the reason that I’ve gone from watching with my toddler while we cuddle before dinner, to grabbing the remote and watching myself—just a grown woman and some animated blue dogs—has to do with our particular cultural and historical moment. I suspect I’m not the only one.
It has been a hard time. We’re going on three years now of consecutively hard years, collectively. And somewhere between the recession of the Omicron variant and the invasion of Ukraine I found myself desperate for something to give me a little uplift from the happenings on Planet Earth. And I intuitively reached for the remote and turned on Bluey.
It’s not the play that takes place in the show that intrigues and endears me most (it’s a bit much at times—I don’t have the energy to play with my child for hours).
Rather, it’s the play and creativity that goes into making the show. The writing is experimental and playful; it’s not like anything I’ve seen before in a kid’s show. It’s not even like anything in most adult shows.
When I first started watching with my three-year old, I encountered what is now one of my favorite episodes, “Fruit bat.” At the end, Bluey goes to bed and falls asleep, but it doesn’t end there. Instead, we enter into Bluey’s dream with her, and then Bluey flies away and visits her dad inside his dream while she’s inside her dream, and they have a charming heart-to-heart inter-dream exchange.
I sat up on the couch and called to my partner making dinner in the kitchen: “Come see this!” I laughed, “This kid’s show has a post-modern ending. What is happening??”
The episodes don’t center the usual lessons or morality tales of kid’s shows. Often, there’s no lesson or cautionary tale in Bluey. There are no facts, no lessons about shapes and colors. It’s not educational in any official sense, which it seems isn’t even allowed in U.S. children’s programming.
Rather, it sometimes winks at the fact that grown-ups don’t have all the answers; Chili and Bandit get tangled trying to answer their kids’ questions. In one case, Bandit bails by throwing himself into the swimming pool when he hears himself fumbling one of Bluey’s interrogations.
Instead, the 7-minute episodes are more like indie shorts, or sketch comedies. Joe Brumm, the show’s creator, doesn’t have a writing team, he writes pretty much alone, based on experiences with his own kids, according to New York Magazine.
He also insisted on hiring a composer, Joff Bush, to score each episode individually, instead of the canned 2-3 songs that usually repeat in kid’s shows. Bush leans heavily on classical music and whimsical melodicas, and as a result it feels like we are sometimes watching indie short films…with blue dogs.
In one episode, we enter into a dream space where four-year old Bingo travels through space and time accompanied by Gustav Holst’s symphonic “Jupiter.” It’s like a Terrence Malick film made into a 7-minute kid’s show.
Another zooms in on a child’s face and goes into slow motion for a full 10 seconds as she inspects an insect crawling on a leaf, while an orchestra crescendos.
I think what speaks to my heart about this program at this moment is that here is a group of adults who have been living under the same pandemic days and hard times of the last several years, who have been playing and experimenting.
They have been waking up in the morning and drinking too much coffee like I have, and feeling heartsick over the headlines like I have, and nevertheless their imagination perks up and says: “What about a scene where a 4-year old soars through the universe, gives up the toy that she treasures most so that toy can gain freedom, and hears her mother’s voice through the infinite burning of the sun? And we score it to something like Wagner.”
This is the energy that I need right now.
In “The Examined Family” Courtney Martin recently wrote about learning to live well through hard times, and the possibility that creativity is its own form of care.
“I have found—even in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning, especially in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning—that weird, small projects keep me alive,” she writes. She makes collages with her daughter. She writes poems.
She quotes Iraqi artist Sundus Abdul Hadi from Take Care Your Self: The Art and Culture of Care and Liberation, and Hadi poses a question that stopped me cold:
“What is the opposite of violence?”
“…her answer, as is mine, is not simply peace, but creativity and care,” writes Martin, who argues that creating “reclaims one’s energy away from destruction.”
“People have to remind themselves and each other about our capacity for kindness and delight.”
I think we are settling into the difficult reality that we are living in a historic time when it’s hard to be on Planet Earth and witness all that we are witnessing. Sometimes it’s hard to be raising a small child while also cultivating a positive imagination for the future.
Unabashed creativity and delight—even and maybe especially in a children’s program— feels something like the opposite of violence to me right now.
I have been thinking about how to stay buoyant and stay engaged while world events feel overwhelming. Creativity seems to be part of the answer, and so does care and intimacy. Care and intimacy are on the list of ideals that I live for.
The thing that I find most comforting about Bluey is its depiction of the intimacy of the domestic sphere, and how that intimacy layers our lives with meaning.
The moment when Bluey dives to get a toy from the bottom of the swimming pool, and looks up to see the silhouettes of her parents just as they kiss overhead.
The scene where Chili catches up to her aging dad, who she’s been scolding to slow down since he’s had heart surgery: when he puts his arm around her we see from behind that in that moment she shrinks back into small child Chili, his little girl.
Care is often unpaid, and often unrecognized. Yet care creates the intimacy that is the glue between us, across generations; the thing that has lifted us across the span of time to the current moment where we still feed and clothe each other, cheer each other up, teach each other, dance with each other, keep it all going in spite of everything.
On a particularly tough day last winter, I cried for a while on the couch after watching war unfold. It felt hard to get up, hard to move, and the small gestures I could make to alleviate suffering felt…so small. When I left the house to pick up my daughter from preschool, I looked up and saw that that the freezing ice and rain that had been falling all afternoon had coated the trees with ice, making them appear as though they were made of glass. The sun came out and lit up the frozen trees, and the whole street dazzled.
When she came out of school, my daughter’s face turned up to the ice-trees in delight. “It’s shiny,” she said, searching for a word for this new experience.
On the way home we stopped to inspect a low branch, and when I lifted her I felt the camera pan in on her eyes while she inspected the sparkling crystals.
Time slowed down, and the music swelled. My heart lifted. I froze the frame in my mind: one of millions of moments of shared intimacy that will stitch—are stitching—our lives together.
It was enough, for the moment, to carry me through another day.
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I love this essay so much! I love how you make clear the resilience that comes through creative practice, and how as parents our greatest strength comes from our ability to be real with our kids and still maintain playful imaginative experimental play. What an amazing antidote to all the seriousness (and self-seriousness) I know I suffer from!
Lane, thank you for your endearing thoughts. What you have created here, with your inspiring words, surely lifts my spirit and soul!