Bluey is a good show but this whole thing is getting to be a bit much
You don't have to talk about how you've cried about it.
We have four small children so perhaps unsurprisingly we’ve enjoyed watching Bluey a good bit over the last few years. Bluey is a show about a family of Australian Blue Heelers—a mother, a father, and two daughters—who navigate the trials and tribulations and joys and sorrows of family life, of childhood, of adulthood, of life in general. It’s really a fine kid’s show—it’s lighthearted even as it deals with serious subjects, it’s sweet, it’s redemptive, it’s gentle and really rather funny at times. As a plus, it’s pretty much politically neutral. I don’t know if it was deliberately designed this way or if its creators are just sort of apolitical, but the show is amazingly free of the really repulsive trappings of what we’ve come to call “woke” or “wokeism.” There are no gay dog dads or cross-dressing transgender doggie children, there’s no insufferable preachy monologues on racial conflict, there’s no jargony, theory-laden diatribes on feminism or male toxicity or whatever. I know it’s a children’s show so maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. But hard-left ideologues these days have captured most cultural institutions of any real value, so finding something popular that you can just enjoy—or that your kids can just enjoy—without being harangued by purple-haired graduate students…it’s refreshing. It’s nice.
Bluey is good but at this point it’s getting to be a bit much. The show has become popular with a large devoted fanbase of adults—many of them with children, still many others without kids at all—and there’s this sort of cultish adult obsession around it that’s become this whole Internet zeitgeist. I will readily admit to enjoying Bluey when I have the time to watch an episode with our kids. But, look, it’s a kid’s cartoon. It’s made for children. It’s sort of odd that it has this big adult fanbase. I’ve probably seen less than 20% of the show’s catalogue, maybe fully two dozen nine-minute episodes out of more than 150 and counting, but there seems to be a huge amount of grown men and women who watch it as if it’s a show made for adults. That’s sort of odd.
Odd’s not the end of the world, of course, everyone does an odd thing every now and then, but even stranger still is the heavily emotional discourse surrounding the show. People are really, really into talking about how much they cry while watching Bluey. It’s become a whole thing. Here are some headlines, for instance, that emerged after the show’s latest blockbuster episode, “The Sign:”
Parents are sobbing over 'Bluey' episode 'The Sign.'
15 Most Emotional Moments From "The Sign" That Definitely Made Us Cry
Disney’s Giant New ‘Bluey’ Episode, The Sign, Is Making Parents Cry
I mean, look: Isn’t this sort of lame? It feels rather lame. It feels like it’s become this saccharine Internet phenomenon in a way that’s just really, objectively uncool. I really think we should bring slurs like “lame” and “uncool” back to the forefront of our popular discourse. There used to be some reluctance on the part of the general public to be seen as uncool or lame. It meant you were boring, that people weren’t really interested in being around you, that the way you handled yourself and carried yourself was just a total downer that nobody wanted to be around. That kind of insult, it can work wonders in a lot of cases; it can cause you to straighten up and start flying right. One of the situations in which these libels might be useful—and here I am just spitballing—is when people are crying about a children’s dog TV show and then talking about it proudly on the Internet. We shouldn’t be afraid to call that “lame.”
In the spirit of fairness I should admit that I have gotten somewhat misty-eyed here and there at Bluey episodes. As a cartoon show it’s really quite effective at conveying a range of moving emotions and feelings in very effective ways. It accomplishes a lot of that by using the innocence of children as a sort of springboard for psychological exploration; you get a heavy dose of meditative nostalgia every time you watch these little dogs adjust to and accept life’s difficulties in the safety of their own home. It hits you quite literally where you live. So I get it.
But also, I’m not really interested in talking about, at least beyond admitting in passing that I’ve found parts of the show to be moving enough to bring a tear or two. Yet so many other people seem really excited to share how they’ve cried over Bluey—like cried hard, “ugly-cried,” as the kids say these days—so much so that the topic can dominate entire entertainment-news cycles. And that’s lame. Lamer still is the sense that the show’s creators are doubtlessly fully aware of it at this point and have begun tailoring their children’s cartoon show to make grown adults cry and then write about it on the Internet. Man, that is just impossibly lame, isn’t it?
I should think this is mostly a white-person phenomenon. For some reason many white people really love to talk about the times that they’ve cried. It’s this whole thing now. Some years ago in one of her many hit songs, Taylor Swift sang to her erstwhile lover about “how you held me in your arms that September night / The first time you ever saw me cry.” It’s a big deal for a white woman to allow someone else to see her cry. And honestly at this point Taylor Swift has become kind of a synecdoche for all white people everywhere, so you can bet that if she’s into something then other white people are too. Talking about crying is a very big deal for white people. They love it! I don’t know why. But I think that’s what’s driving a lot of this.
Here’s the verdict: Bluey is a good show; it’s especially good as a children’s show in an era when children’s programming is pretty bad. It’s well-written, funny, and at times rather moving. It’s okay if you’ve welled up a bit when watching its more affecting episodes with your kids. That’s fine. But also, don’t tell the world about it. Don’t make it a whole thing. Don’t rush to the Internet to announce how you cried over a children’s cartoon. It’s undignified and silly. Just be normal about this. Don’t be weird about it.