There’s a scene in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar that breaks my heart every time I watch it. Matthew McConaughey travels to an alien planet knowing that, for every hour he spends on its surface, seven years will pass on Earth. But something goes wrong, and the mission takes longer than he anticipated. He leaves the planet to discover that 23 Earth years have passed. His children, who he left behind on Earth, are now adults who have grown up without him. Anyway, it breaks my heart because it’s basically the same as being a non-Australian Bluey fan.
Ten Bluey episodes have appeared on Disney+ this morning. If you have children of the appropriate age, you will have been aware of this for weeks. And if you weren’t, you can all but guarantee that these episodes will play on an unbroken loop throughout the summer holidays. However, I hesitate to call these episodes new, because Australians got them a full year ago.
Thanks to whatever complicated licensing agreement exists between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Studios Kids & Family and Disney+, a year-long delay exists between a Bluey episode’s Australian premiere and the day the rest of the world gets to see it. This means that anyone with their ear to the ground about these things will know almost everything about the latest Disney episodes. They’ll know Lin-Manuel Miranda plays a talking horse called Major Tom in them. They’ll know one episode features the return of the Grannies, the old lady characters played by Bluey and Bingo. They’ll know that, in one spectacular episode, Bluey denies being an animated creation of a human being, while being hand-animated by a human being.
The good news is that, on the basis of these 10 episodes, Bluey is still arguably the best television series in the world. Every seven-minute episode is its own self-contained short story, most of them nudging at the boundaries of what a children’s show can be. We’ve already seen time-jumps (in Camping) and head-spinning, millennia-spanning stories about the history and future of mankind (Flatpack), so we know how ambitious Bluey can be. Happily, it has found a handful of new ways to break the form. One episode here has a fake ending. I haven’t watched it with my children yet, but I am slightly – if rightly – worried that it will explode their skulls.
It also remains a show that exists as much for parents as for children. Bandit, Bluey’s father, is still the world’s best dad; constantly present and available, inventing a new clutch of games that he almost instantly regrets. Bluey’s runaway success means that it has started to subtly flex at lesser creations (see the dismal Paw Patrol clone that opens Turtleboy), as a happy demonstration that it understands the sort of crap we usually have to watch. Better still, in Onesies it introduces a character who is childfree not by choice, and the subject is dealt with in a stunningly thoughtful way. You will lap these episodes up multiple times, and find wonderful new details to unearth. Because, after all, this is Bluey and that’s what Bluey does.
But that hasn’t made the wait any less agonising. Nor has the fact that the next batch of episodes has just finished airing in Australia, which means it’ll be another year before we see them. This especially stings because one of them, entitled Cricket, currently has a higher IMDb score than season two’s majestic Sleepytime. And when you remember that Sleepytime made news for being the best-reviewed episode of television of all time, you realise that the next 12 months are going to drag terribly.
Which brings me back to Interstellar. My oldest child is eight now. When Bluey first debuted on Disney+, it was all that he and his brother would watch. When the first clutch of season three episodes dropped last year, he was still excited, but slightly less than he had been. I know he’ll watch these new episodes just as eagerly as before, but I’m starting to notice that he needs more encouragement to watch Bluey in the first place. When Cricket comes out he’ll be a nine-year-old, all sighs and fringe and affected disaffection, and I worry that he’ll think Bluey is for little kids. And by the time we get to see the final three (not even out in Australia yet) episodes of the season – which I’m wildly excited about for a whole different reason – there is a chance that Bluey might be behind him altogether.
As a parent, you get used to your children growing out of things without warning. And, if anything, the slow drip of new Bluey episodes is simply a sign that the show’s creator, Joe Brumm, and his team are fiercely trying to protect the show from any perceivable drop in quality. But, selfishly, I want all the episodes to air all around the world at exactly the same time, right now. Bluey is the best thing on TV, and I really hate the thought of my kids growing up without it.
This article was amended on 12 July 2023 as a previous version said that Bluey was co-created by BBC Worldwide, rather than BBC Studios Kids & Family.
