Is This the End for Bluey?

This article contains spoilers for the Bluey episode “The Sign.”

A few weeks ago, I found myself, fairly late at night, Googling Is Bandit Heeler depressed? This is, I admit, a ridiculous thing to wonder about a cartoon dog, but what can I say? The vibes had just been off for the patriarch of Bluey, Disney+’s wildly popular show about a family of Australian Blue Heelers. In “Stickbird,” something is clearly bothering Bandit, to the point where he’s grouchy and detached on a family vacation. And in “TV Shop,” a transcendent piece of small-scale storytelling set in a drugstore, Bandit goes to buy vitamins because he’s been feeling down, and while he’s shopping, his kids—Bluey and Bingo—manage to choreograph a multipart video performance with more dynamism and emotional heft than anything by Ivo van Hove. (At home, this is the part where my kids and I unfailingly break into frenzied, humiliating Dance Mode.) But Bandit, although he appreciates what his children have done, can muster only a small smile and a foot tap while watching. It felt a little unsettling.

Most popular children’s television is, to put it bluntly, horrific. I’m half-convinced that CoComelon is a psyop meant to lull all our children into the placid, zombified state my husband and I call the CoCo-coma. Five minutes of Blippi can feel like a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The shows that children enjoy watching—which tend to involve repetition, visual stimuli, annoying sounds, and physical comedy—are at odds with what makes them engaging for adults (plot, characterization, stakes). To be able to please both factions of viewers is to be operating at a virtuosic level, as my colleague David Sims has written. It’s an enormously difficult thing to pull off.

Read: In praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children

Bluey manages not just to do it but to make it look easy. The series, which is currently in its third season, essentially plays out in two different registers, one for kids and one for adults. My 3-year-olds can watch any episode and see the things that delight or perplex them daily: ice cream that melts before you can eat it, siblings who won’t share, gifts that are somehow all wrong, drawings that don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to. I, meanwhile, can watch scenarios I’ve never before seen portrayed on any kind of kids’ show: hungover parenting, babysitter anxiety, trying to make friends in midlife, the cruel isolation of infertility, the particular limbic state of waiting for a child to finish going to the bathroom at 3 o’clock in the morning. This is a show that can acknowledge pregnancy loss with just a balloon pop and a quick, instinctual hand grab, as in the episode “The Show.” But it can also tell my kids, as it does in “Cricket,” that the moments that feel hardest for them are the very moments that will make them stronger, braver, kinder. Watching Bluey, we all win.

And so I’m slightly torn up over “The Sign,” a new, 30-minute special episode that points unmistakably toward an ending, or a change. (A concluding installment for the current season, titled “Surprise,” has recently been added to the series’ Wikipedia page as premiering on April 21.) On the one hand, Bluey can’t end, because this is the year 2024 and no fertile intellectual property worth billions of dollars can be left on the vine. Last weekend, I went to a Bluey exhibition at a botanical garden in London that was so oversubscribed that cars were piled up a full two miles away, the merch was sold out, and the line to “meet” Bluey ran all the way from the lilac bushes to the end of the rhododendron dell. (Please just believe me that it was a long, long line.) I’ve heard other parents joke that Bluey is really just elaborate propaganda for Australia, where all children now seem intent on going. Certain expressions from the show—“It was the ’80s!”—are now embedded in parents’ lingua franca. There’s just no way that an enterprising entertainment corporation is going to let this kind of cultural power go.

And yet: A recent Bloomberg Businessweek story detailed some of the peculiarities of the show’s contractual agreements, as well as the anxieties of Joe Brumm, its creator, who writes or co-writes every episode. (The weltschmerz and burnout I’d been picking up from Bandit, it turns out, were similar to Brumm’s own.) And then there’s the episode itself, which has the distinct feel of a victory lap, incorporating callbacks to favorite episodes, an examination of what it means for stories to end, and a meditative attitude toward change. The conceit of “The Sign” is that the Heeler family—Bandit, Chilli, Bluey, and Bingo—are selling their house and moving to a different city. But first, there’s a wedding: Bandit’s older brother, Rad, and Chilli’s friend Frisky, who met in “Double Babysitter,” are getting married in the Heeler backyard.

Bluey is devastated by the impending move, and so, inevitably, are we. I realized while watching the episode that memories of the past four years of my life are curiously interwoven with scenes from this animated house—our adjustment from cribs to toddler beds, the (often-unspoken) tension over who takes on which component of parenting, the guilt over missteps, the indescribable affront of being immediately asked to get something for someone when you’ve just sat down for the first time in six hours. My feelings while watching “The Sign” were much the same as the ones I had when my family left New York for London after the early months of the coronavirus pandemic: How can the Heelers just leave? Isn’t this a mistake? What about friends? Where will they get bagels? (Maybe that one’s just mine.) How can you abandon a teacher as benevolent and wise as Calypso? It’s Calypso, of course, who puts the episode’s moral into Taoist perspective for Bluey and her friends: Change by its nature is neither good nor bad, just inevitable.

“The Sign” plays out with this kind of practiced, accepting grace—until it doesn’t. A charmless real-estate agent shows the Heeler house to “dogs with no eyes” (Bologneses? Komondors? Malteses?), who were hoping for a house with a pool but are sold on the home anyway. After a miscommunication, Bluey’s soon-to-be aunt, Frisky, flees before the wedding and is chased by Chilli, Bluey, Bingo, and the kids’ cousins, Muffin and Socks. Bluey finds a penny on the floor of Frisky’s favorite juice bar. Chilli eventually tracks Frisky down at a scenic viewpoint, where the kids get Bluey’s penny stuck in the penny slot of a public telescope. Later, the dogs with no eyes are celebrating their new home at the scenic viewpoint when they come across Bluey’s penny, look through the telescope, and see a different house with a for sale sign … and a pool.

The question of whether the Heelers will leave their city and community is such an affecting one, I think, because it’s inextricable from the existential questions of parenting. What does a better life for your family look like? What does money mean in value compared with all the things you can’t buy—connections, security, a sense of home? When do parental needs get to override those of kids? There are no answers in the episode, and no answers in life—just the assurance that what happens will happen, and that events might be influenced occasionally by the trickery of the universe. “The Sign” is full of allusions that underscore the idea of change: Brandy, Chilli’s estranged sister, is pregnant; Winton’s lonely divorced dad might indeed have a chance with the terriers’ mom; Bingo’s butterfly, whom she saved from a watery death in “Slide,” helps Chilli find Frisky, as if to emphasize the necessity of metamorphosis. If this is supposed to be in anticipation of an ending, or a change in format, it functions perfectly, reminding us both that the show will always be here and that progress can be its own kind of consolation.

I agree to accept the things I cannot change. But can this please not be the end? Everyone has their own favorite Bluey episodes (the avant-garde experimentation of “Sleepytime” and “Rain” is unmatched TV), but beyond that, the show has managed something that very few of its peers have: It’s created a world so expansive and meaningful that, for kids and adults who watch, it informs the one we live in. My children don’t see clouds the same way after “Shadowlands”; we play Octopus when we’re bored; I’ve come to appreciate the most repetitive rituals (“Bin Night”) as the moments when real communication can be possible. Bluey has given us the gift of more than 150 episodes, enough of them to return to over and over, maybe even more than we deserve. And yet, every new installment is evidence that the show is becoming ever more creative, more empathetic, more necessary. Bluey gives parents and their kids—gives all of us—the chance to see the same thing, interpret it differently, and come together in the process of watching.