Some months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I learned that my children had begun watching the Australian cartoon series “Bluey.” My first instinct was to deliver a sermon on politicization. Surely the Land Down Under, imposer of some of the strictest lockdown measures on the planet, would use its cultural export to lecture children on the benefits of indoor masking. Perhaps the show’s anthropomorphic dogs would line up on-screen to get their “jab,” blithely queuing to embrace their destiny as wards of a medico-tyrannical state.
Yes, reader, I had some concerns. What I didn’t do, and should have done, was watch a few episodes myself to suss things out. What I would have discovered is that “Bluey” is not only a (mostly) nonpartisan production but the best children’s programming since Chuck Jones’s masterly Looney Tunes shorts of midcentury. Whatever you have heard about the adventures of dad Bandit, mom Chilli, and sisters Bingo and Bluey, the reality is even more charming.
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Why write about “Bluey” now? After all, the show’s first season debuted on Disney+ in early 2020, with subsequent runs dropping in the months that followed. No new full-length installments have been released since April 2024, and the forthcoming “Bluey” movie isn’t on my TV beat. The answer is that my children will not be watching cartoons of this or any other kind for much longer and were eager, now, to guide me through their favorite moments. A hard-bitten critic can resist much, but even he is no match for that incontestable logic.
A few episodes will give the flavor. The first season’s highlight, “Camping,” sees our heroes leaving urban Brisbane for a holiday in the Australian bush. There, 6-year-old Bluey meets and befriends Jean-Luc, who speaks only French and must communicate through the universal language of play. Having planted a sapling together, the two youngsters depart after a few days with their respective families. Yet a lovely postscript reveals that “Bluey” returns with her own children decades later. Who should greet her, beneath a now-soaring pink trumpet tree, but a grown-up Jean-Luc?
“Escape,” a top installment from the second season, sees Bandit and Chilli dropping Bingo and Bluey off at Grandma’s on the way to a second honeymoon. Backed by a temporarily primitive animation style, husband and wife take their offspring through an imagined world in which Bingo and Bluey first chase and then evade their parents, a perfect representation of childhood. Once again, a closing scene introduces something new to ponder. “I don’t know where you get your ideas from,” Nana tells Bingo and Bluey, while watching them draw. Adults and children alike will know the answer: Bandit and Chilli have handed down something precious.
“Bluey” often imparts that kind of lesson — or, more precisely, a lesson of that size. In “Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound,” Bluey and company stage a skit for a hospital-bound Bingo, teaching us along the way that everyone gets sick at times. (This is the famous “bum worms” episode. Ask a child.) Meanwhile, the third-season episode “Phones” juxtaposes the faint absurdity of app culture with the reassurance that “kids are still kids.” In what is perhaps the show’s most explicitly political episode, “Circus” from season two, Bluey and Bingo frolic while their parents vote. By putting our young protagonists in the path of a playground autocrat, the show tells a hard truth about the artificiality of the civic world.
For the most part, Bluey’s values are those of a cosmopolitan liberal: Embrace the “other”; be open-minded in all things. Yet the show is also fundamentally conservative, portraying with clear admiration a traditional nuclear family enacting conventional norms. To my delight, the production is often merciless in its skewering of the bubble-wrapped childhoods now prevalent in the West. In “Pass the Parcel,” the series’s single best episode, a democratized party game is reborn as a winner-take-all struggle. “This isn’t the ’80s,” a bemused Bandit tells the gamemaster. For a few minutes, however, it is.
Because the series is a work of art, not propaganda, “Bluey” inhabits these contradictions rather than resolving them. Even as it concedes that Australian parents may be “raising a nation of squibs,” the show goes out of its way to evoke the special problems of the social-media age. Take, for instance, Bluey’s cry near the end of “Hammerbarn,” a season-two episode in which the sisters learn that comparison is the thief of joy. “I can’t be happy with what I’ve got when what she has is better,” Bluey says of Bingo. Has anyone ever spoken more accurately for a generation?
Despite what these examples may suggest, “Bluey’s” commentary is rarely pointed. More often, it operates on the level of smirking irony, as if to remind us that life will not allow us our certainties forever. Later in “Hammerbarn,” an installment set largely in a hardware store, Chilli instructs her children that “stuff costs money [and] there’s no magical place where everything’s just free.” An amusing follow-up shot, however, sees Bluey and Bingo discovering the paint-swatches aisle. There, everything is, in fact, just free.
The show is not without small annoyances. “The Sign,” from season three, features a benevolent reference to a minor character’s two moms. Progressives just can’t help themselves. The same episode portrays without scorn the ridiculous nanny-state laws governing where one’s own child can ride in one’s own car. One might wish, throughout, that “Bluey” mocked more severely the liberal pieties that govern the social world. For that, I suppose, we will have to wait for another cartoon. Or watch The Simpsons at its best. There was a show that knew how to have fun.
Does “Bluey?” In its different way, yes. Indeed, watching the show in recent days, I have been shocked by how smartly the series is conceived and put together. “Bluey” is not secretly “for adults,” as the cynical cartoon refrain often goes. Rather, it entertains young children without treating them like idiots. In 2026, that’s good enough.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.
