![]() ![]() In “Cafe,” I watch the dad, Bandit, and wonder at his patience, his perpetual willingness to pretend to eat yet another imaginary hamburger, his constant readiness to play along. They laugh so hard I wonder if they’re hallucinating. As the episode escalates from a minor mess all the way up to spilled food and an emergency outdoor-toilet situation, my kids’ gasping, room-filling laughs incapacitate them. My daughters fall into peals of laughter watching an episode like “Takeaway,” in which Bluey and Bingo wreak increasing havoc outside a restaurant while their dad waits for his order. Its story lines are often small and domestic, the stuff instantly recognizable to kids everywhere who have been bored on a long car ride or struggled with a group of playmates who can’t quite figure out how to play together. This spring, I stood in a Hallmark store and contemplated whether to get my youngest daughter a Bluey book or a Bluey card game for her birthday.īluey has released over 100 episodes, each of which is seven minutes long. There are Bluey stuffed animals at Target now. As production begins on season three, the show feels as if it’s on the brink of broader global popularity. Episodes of its first season reached 16 million views in the U.S., and season two will become available to stream on Disney+ on May 28. The show jumped in popularity when its 52-episode first season began streaming on Disney+ in January 2020, but the weekly release of Bluey’s incredible second season on the Disney Channel over the past year has changed the conversation from “What a good show” to “Oh my God, Bluey.” Last year, a number of TV critics put the series on their lists of the best TV of 2020, period. It has been slower to catch on in the U.S. I sincerely love watching it, unlike the countless kids’ shows I keep an eye on in the background or the ones I sit down to watch with my kids because the experts say shared screen time is the gold standard or whatever.īluey premiered in 2018 and swiftly became popular in Australia. ![]() Bluey is the only one that knows how hilarious play can be, how silly and intense, how trivial but life-changing. All of it is about imagination, but almost none of it is all that imaginative. ![]() Every streaming platform offers an endless list of animated children’s series following puppies solving problems, cartoon girls in wish-granting fairy-tale worlds, and heroes on adventures. It’s really a show about Bluey and Bingo playing elaborate games with their parents and their friends, about the joy and strangeness of children’s imaginations and desires. Bluey is about a family of cartoon dogs who live in Brisbane: a mom named Chilli the dad, Bandit and their two daughters, Bingo and Bluey, roughly ages 4 and 6. So I watch the Australian children’s show Bluey with a mix of awe, wistfulness, love, and a dash of resentment. The unicorn’s giant embroidered sparkly eyes stare at me reproachfully. At the end of most days, my desk is strewn with all the babies I was supposed to care for but had abandoned immediately. I can’t fully enter her headspace or shake the part of me that registers how absurd it is. She will be the babysitter, and I am the mama, and we will enter an endless cycle of putting the unicorn-ball baby to bed and waking it up. She wants me to cuddle them, whisper to them, devote the next 40 minutes to the all-consuming care of a vaguely unicorn-like, rainbow-tufted sphere. My 4-year-old loves to hand me stuffed animals and declare they are my new babies. Bluey, hand drawn by animator Beth Harvey ![]()
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