On Bluey, becoming a mother, and things unseen (preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion.

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For the past several years, I have been making the case to anyone who will listen that Bluey, the three-seasons-and-a-movie animated kids show sensation from Australia, is the truest heir to Community, the show that made my criticism career. I reach for Community both because I'm associated so strongly with it and because it's still many people's main frame of reference for a kind of show that has largely faded from the TV landscape: an anthology show hiding in the guise of an ongoing series. When you turned on Community (or The X-Files or The Simpsons or Moonlighting or etc.), you never knew what show you were going to get. So it is with Bluey.

Just within the first half of Season 2 — the chunk of episodes containing "Sleepytime" — there are episodes told in real-time as Mum tries to get her daughters out the door, a fantasy episode done in a different art style, an episode narrated by a minor character, and an episode that recounts the history of life on Earth using the assembly of a porch swing as a jumping off point. What's more, these episodes generally work on about three levels simultaneously. There's a very simple "this is the game we're playing this week" level for kids, then a "this is the deeper emotional conflict inherent to childhood we're exploring this week" level for their parents. Finally, there is the level of metaphor, the larger, more existential questions driving that week's episode, questions neither parent nor child will have easy answers for. By the time of the show's third (and best) season, Bluey was radically shifting its form with what felt like every other episode.

Now, the reason for this experimentation is simple: Bluey made 154 episodes across three seasons of television, and all 154 of those episodes were written by series creator Joe Brumm, with only 12 of them featuring co-writer credits. (And two of those episodes only credit a co-writer with the idea for the episode, rather than taking some portion of scriptwriting duties off Brumm's hands.) Even allowing for the fact that Bluey episodes are seven minutes long, that's over 18 hours, a staggering amount of television to write (almost) singlehandedly, and Brumm did so over the course of six years, from the show's 2018 premiere to its 2024 possible series finale, "Surprise." And that's to say nothing of the forthcoming movie, out next year. When you write that much television, you start to get a little bored, a little interested in just how much you can break what you've built and find a way to put it back together so the next episode still feels like the same show.

When he reached the end of Season 3, Brumm seemed a little burnt out, and I do not blame him. As someone who writes for television, the sheer productivity of Brumm is a little terrifying, as is his consistency. Not every episode of Bluey works entirely, but when I go looking for episodes I outright dislike, there are only a handful. For the most part, Bluey, even in its more formulaic episodes, is a model of storytelling efficiency, an example of how a great TV show can take the frame it exists within and find every single way to expand upon it. I am not joking when I say that watching it has made me a better writer, able to do more with less.

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