Mailbag Monday: Yes, Bluey is Really Good

A reader asks for my take on why

From JD:

Hi Ethan - 

Wondering if you could offer your two cents (as a parent) about your opinion of the TV show Bluey? Is it not the best/most constructive piece of media for either kids or adults? What regularly surprises me is the fact that it leans on what many would consider 'conservative' virtues (you have to earn your keep, hard work pays off, tradition is good, etc.) I find this show so much more fulfilling than any other piece of media my kids consume which almost always just boils down to 'be nice'. On top of this the music is amazing. Do your kids like it/watch it? 

My three year old and I have been most impressed with the Cricket episode which was just released recently. It's fantastic!

Well, JD, the overarching answer is yes, my kids watch Bluey.

I can’t say I’m an expert on the themes, or have even thought much about where it falls on the conservative/liberal spectrum. I just know I like the show and, on occasion, feel oddly emotional when paying full attention.

The end of the Chest episode absolutely destroyed me, for example. I completely related to Bandit’s struggle as a father, which is quite an accomplishment considering he’s a blue cartoon dog from Australia. I, like Bandit, try to introduce activities that might improve my kids’ future lives, with limited success. I, like Bandit, have a wife who tries to get me to relax about all this.

Beyond its intrinsic quality, I think Bluey succeeds because it’s a show about parenting. You’d think that might doom it, because, as Freddie has pointed out, there’s this modern flaw in kids entertainment of making the content for adult sensibilities. Bluey works, though, in part because many kids are, at some level, interested in how parenting goes. Children are context seekers. They want to know about boundaries, rules, and whether their experience bears any resemblance to what other kids go through.

Not that I completely get what my kids seek in entertainment. There’s a lot of mystery there and usually, I’m cold to what my oldest loves. I’m just happy that Bluey exists as this rare island of quality that I can watch with my children. As entertainment gets more fragmented and optimized to specific tastes, less is shared across generations. Given this backdrop, I’m especially thankful for the rare artistic triumph that transcends this gap between emergent sentience and parenthood. Well done, cartoon dogs from Down Under.