There is a children’s TV show called Bluey 3, which follows a family of anthropomorphic dogs and their life in Australia. The lineup includes Bluey, a 6-year old Blue Heeler puppy, and her family: her dad Bandit, her mom Chilli, and her little sister Bingo.

Bluey is an Australian TV show that premiered in 2018 created by Joe Brumm who wanted to portray what it was like for kids to be kids through an Australian version of Peppa Pig . Brumm has two little girls and wanted to create a show that draws on his real life - the highs and lows of being parents, being a family, being kids.

The lessons are about conveying these seemingly simple ideas of sharing and playing, but they are also about riding bikes and cleaning the house and hungover parenting, infertility, and making adult friends, and what it means to belong or to not belong at all.

Bluey is successful because it is human (ironically enough).

In one episode, ‘Stickbird’, Bluey and her family go to the beach. However, Bandit is clearly struggling with something, lethargic and sad. When Bingo’s sand castle gets knocked over, he utters “When you put something beautiful into the world, it’s no longer yours, really.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking a lot about how this show resonates with both parents and kids, and what it means to create something beautiful.

Brumm reminds me of the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, a comic that he mentioned he got inspiration from. In talking about retiring from Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson says “My approach was probably too crazy to sustain for a lifetime but it let me draw the exact strip I wanted while it lasted.”

Joe Brumm has managed to “cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human” as Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote. Sometimes, we can only see ourselves through mirrors, and Bluey is just that - a reflection for parents to see themselves, so they can see their kids. The kids see themselves in the characters and the stories but it also helps them to see their parents as people.

Bluey is a form of beauty, one that is relatively rare. There is more of it now, especially if you know where to look. As Steven Nightingale wrote in The Paradise Notebooks

In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike; to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport; a longed — for, conscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.

I think Bluey is one of the most beautiful things of the past half decade. And it’s lessons in humanity, in decision-making, in seeing people as people outside the faux-locality, as treating it’s audience as bigger than a nonthing, is something to learn from.

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