Bluey is the second-most streamed TV show in the world, according to The Guardian. Not the second-most popular children’s show – the second-most popular show, full stop.

Everyone loves Bluey and her family. And I do, too!

But should we? Are Ludo Studio taking their responsibility as a global influence seriously?

After watching the special, 28-minute episode of Bluey, The Sign, some parents aren’t so sure. And this controversial episode has raised some interesting questions about the patriarchal implications in the rest of the series, too.

Frisky and Rad’s plot in Bluey’s The Sign episode

Bluey’s The Sign has two main plotlines. One plotline follows the kids – Bluey, Bingo (her little sister), and Muffin and Socks (their cousins) – as Chilli (their mum) drags them around the city.

They’re chasing after Frisky, their babysitter.

At the start of the episode, Frisky is engaged to marry Rad (Chilli’s brother).

But then someone asks Rad and Frisky where they plan to live after the wedding. Rad reveals that without Frisky’s knowledge or agreement, he has taken a job “out west” and plans for them to move there after the wedding. (We know from previous episodes that Rad is an oil rigger.)

Understandably, Frisky is upset by his unilateral decisions and actions. She rushes to her car and drives off, needing time to think.

During the chase, Bluey asks Chilli about the situation, and Chilli is awkward and dismissive of Frisky’s right to be upset.

When the kids’ car catches up to Frisky at the Mt Coot-tha lookout, Chilli tries to persuade Frisky to go back to Rad, without any acknowledgement that Frisky is right to be upset.

It’s completely hypocritical, and Frisky isn’t blind. She says to Chilli, “You’re only moving because your husbands wants you to.”

Then Rad shows up, makes a lame apology, and Frisky agrees to marry him after all. It’s disappointing, but if this was the only issue in this episode, I could forgive the writers and producers.

Chilli and Bandit’s plot in Bluey’s The Sign episode

The other main plotline is that the Heeler family is packing up to move house, because Bandit (the dad) has accepted a job that’s far away. The previous episode, Ghostbasket, introduces this plot point.

Everyone but Bandit is upset about this move.

Bluey and Bingo face a huge challenge in leaving all of their school friends and starting fresh in another region. They’re old enough to know that they will miss their friends, and that it will take time to make new friends.

And having grown up in this house, they’re also understandably sad about the idea of leaving this home.

Chilli (the mum) is also not looking forward to starting over. We know that she works in airport security, but this episode doesn’t say what she’ll do for work after moving house. It’s as if her job doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Bandit (the dad) is trying to persuade everyone that it’s a good thing that they’re moving. He talks with the real estate agent who is selling the Heeler family home to a couple.

Whenever anyone expresses disappointment or sadness to Bandit, he tries to persuade them that their feelings are invalid, and that they have a lot to look forward to at the new location.

The only reason Bandit changes his mind, and takes their family home off the market, is because the couple who was going to buy their home decides to buy a house with a pool instead.

In the worst, longest-running housing crisis in Australia’s history.

It’s so sweet it’s insane – and unbelievable.

And when he finds this out, again, his decision is again unilateral. He just turns around and removes the “for sale” sign from their front yard.

As one viewer astutely pointed out, there’s so many episodes of Bluey that focus on important conversations between Chilli and Bandit. But not this one. In this one, Bandit and Rad both act as if they are the head of the household, not an equal partner.

Without ever directly saying it, this episode tells kids of all genders, if you’re not male, you shouldn’t expect to have any say or any power in your relationships.

And to top it all off, in the “happy ending” montage at the end of the episode, Winston and his divorced, unhappy dad move in together with the Schauzer terrier pups and their unnamed mum. Why? Before this, we’ve seen them flirt once in TV Shop, and that’s all the justification we get for a beautiful single mum being forced by showrunner Joe Brumm to settle for less.

Anti-feminism in other Bluey episodes

In the episode, Whale Watching, Bandit and the kids manipulate Chilli into pretending to be a whale. This episode happens when Bandit and Chilli are both hungover and exhausted after a party the night before. (Maybe New Year’s? It’s hard to tell.)

The kids start watching a documentary about whales,

On the TV screen, the narrator comments on how the mama whale cares for her baby calf.

When the mama whale jumps out of the water, the kids and Bandit all make sad faces, as if to say, “Why won’t our mum play with us?”

This completely ignores all the endless times Chilli plays actively with her kids – indulging their imaginations, making up games, providing new experiences, making cooking and cleaning fun.

Let alone everything else Chilli does for her family. She works a solid job to provide for them. She carries the mental load of bringing everything the kids need to the pool (Pool), school (because Bandit can’t manage it in Daddy Drop Off), park playdates (Sticky Gecko, Shadow Land), the beach (Relax), parties (Duck Cake), etc.

Let’s be very clear – across all the standards you can think of, Chilli is a great mum.

But now that her whole family is guilt-tripping her, she gets off the couch and starts throwing herself around, pretending to be the mama whale.

Bizarrely, that’s the “happy ending” for this episode – a tired mum being manipulated into abandoning her own needs in favour of playing yet another game for the kids.

In a wide variety of episodes like Hotel and The Grannies, Bandit is seen doing household chores together with Chilli – but he doesn’t do them as well as her. I know Bingo loves his attempt in Duck Cake, but people act like Bandit is father of the year.

In BBQ, Bingo says, “Isn’t anyone going to mention the salad?!” Everyone is talking about the grilled meat prepared by Bandit and his brother Stripe, while nobody has thanked Chilli for making the salad.

In The Decider, the male parents, Bandit and Lucky’s dad Pat, are obsessed with the footy, and they’re not kind about it to Lucky’s mum, Janelle, who is a Blues supporter. Meanwhile, the female children are focussed on the social mechanics and seem to largely not understand the football game. How is this reinforcement of gendered interest helpful?

In Dad Baby, the entire joke of the episode is a male-presenting dog giving birth to a baby. It’s not openly transphobic, but it’s certainly not very woke.

In most episodes, Bluey gets lauded as “revolutionary” for representing a girl who enjoys things other than pink dresses and dolls. She is … well … blue.

And as GenderEd points out, yes, it’s great that most of the dogs don’t have physically-recognisable stereotypes, like long hair or dresses for the girls and short hair for the boys.

And I recognise Bluey is a kids’ TV show, not a parenting manual.

The Heeler parents have been challenged as being unrealistic in a variety of ways that make normal parents feel bad.

It’s like social media – no one could possibly be as active with their kids 24/7 as these cartoon dogs are in each 7-minute highlights reel. I have to imagine that if the Bluey world was real, the Heeler parents would often have days where things are not so fun and active as in the episodes we’ve watched so far.

When you pay attention to the little moments scattered within the Bluey series from season 1 to season 3 and The Bluey, it’s promoting patriarchal, heteronormative, and harmful ideologies. So even though I love most of the show, I have questions about a lot of it.

Does Bluey promote eating disorders?

In the episode Muffin Cone, the mums engage in self-flaggelating behaviour about what they eat and how much they eat.

The episode Burger Shop begins with Bandit weighing himself on a scale in the bathroom. He looks unhappy with the number on the scale, and grabs a roll on his belly. He says to the kids, who are in the bath tub next to him, “I need to do some exercise.”

The Australian SBS reports that Butterfly Foundation for eating disorder treatment has found kids already have fully-developed negative ideas about their own bodies at just 4 years old. The main target audience of Bluey.

Lack of diverse representation in Bluey

Bluey has almost no representation of kids and parents who are LGBTQIA+, POC or Blak, disabled, or any other important aspects of the real world. We do get to see a handful of examples of diversity…

• A Deaf child in Turtle Boy.
• Winston’s divorced dad in TV Shop.
• Neurodivergent kids in Army and Muffin Cone.
• Infertility in Onesies.

But then there’s the racist “ooga booga” references against First Nations people in the episode Teasing. The ABC did apologise for this, and when adding Bluey to Disney+, the episode was edited to say “shoobi-doo-wop” instead.

And in The Sign itself, when their school teacher, Calypso, retells the ancient Chinese parable of the farmer and his horse, the show doesn’t pay any respects to the story’s Asian heritage. It implies this is just another story.

I love Bluey, I really do. But I do think The Sign gives a harmful message to girls and non-binary kids in Australia, and I believe Ludo Studio can do better.

What do you think of the representation in Bluey?