Why, Bandit’s daughter Bluey asks him during a bathroom break at the movie theatre, is Chunky being told to “just be yourself”? What does that mean?
“Look,” Bandit says cheerfully, “It’s just monkeys singing songs, mate. Don’t think too hard about it.”
The moment, a wink to parents subjected to so many singing monkeys, is also a mark of how far in its dust “Bluey” leaves the rest of contemporary children’s programming. This show, which still prompts belly laughs from my daughter and me even after countless rewatches, meets and surpasses my mother’s bar. It does more than speak to parents and kids together; it is, in the eyes of many parents, a work of art, moving not only in its content but in its respect for our children’s discernment and integrity. In my house, it has become something like a co-parent.
“Bluey” invites us into one of the coziest television families of all time, the Heelers—Bandit, the father dog; Chilli, the mother dog; and their daughters, six-year-old Bluey and four-year-old Bingo, each of whom proceeds through the world, as we all do, in accordance with their own distinct style of play. Play is “Bluey” ’s organizing principle, and the show’s world bends to the logic of play. If Bluey uses a wand of asparagus to transform her father into a walrus, her father will behave exactly like a walrus until released from the spell. She must really mean the spell, though. The laws of play in “Bluey,” which, it is hinted, are better observed in the Heeler family than in most others, are that it be fun, flexible, and, most important, faithfully committed to. Once you’re playing a game, you must play within the rules, and play must take precedence over everything, including professional responsibilities. In the rare case that Chilli or Bandit begs off playing with their girls because they have work to do, they soon relent; work can wait.
If the Heelers excel at turning domestic life into a form of play, what makes this play possible is their family’s absolute security, its durability against anything life might throw at it. Toughness is a recurrent theme; when Bluey and Bingo balk at their parents kissing despite having gross morning breath, Chilli laughs and says, “If you’re gonna belong to someone, you better toughen up.” In the show’s culminating—and uncharacteristically cheesy—scene, Bandit marshals a great burst of strength to pull a “For Sale” sign from the ground outside the family home, preserving the Heeler hearth. If play is the show’s law, the infallible resilience of family structure is its moral core. We might say that “Bluey” ’s all-encompassing game of make-believe, the premise of all its play, is the fantasy of an unbreakable family, complete with ever-attentive parents. Let’s pretend!
Bandit and Chilli’s symphonic parenting is bittersweet to behold, at least for an unpartnered mother who might heretofore have heartily congratulated herself for simply getting us to the roller rink rather than spending the day toggling distractedly between screens and meals and unfinished art projects at home. Much ink has been spilled on the inferiority complex this pair of married dogs has given mere mortal caregivers—“I’m begging you,” “Kate Allen Fox writes” in McSweeney’s“on behalf of a beleaguered nation of exhausted parents. Stop”—but what is their effect on younger viewers? Watching my daughter transfixed by and transported into the Heeler home, I wonder if, when the credits roll and she returns to our own familiar dyad, she experiences any sort of withdrawal. In “Bluey” ’s world, the word “divorce” is never uttered, but the show does have a token child of separation: Winton, the class clown and semi-pariah who fits the stereotype of the clingy, maladjusted product of a broken home. Winton’s classmates often avoid him, even run from him, on account of his being what Bluey calls a “space invader”; he’s always getting up in everyone’s grill. At one point he announces that his dad is “lonely all the time.” (At the end of the series, the writers pair Winton’s dad off with the mother of terrier triplets, the only other confirmedly single parent on the show, “fixing” the problem of separation.)