Ranking Every Bluey Episode (20-1)
I debated how to present these rankings of all the Bluey episodes. My dumbness initially thought it might be one big post, before realizing that if I tried to rank (and write about) 104 episodes of a kids’ TV show on a blog that I barely update as it is, exactly three people will read it and two of them will be me going back and looking for typos.
Then I thought about breaking them into three tiers. It’s the stereotypical way to do such things. But even if you don’t follow studious rigor into dividing them exactly into thirds, a rough-in “top tier” would still have been 30-ish episodes to write about, and the best of the best of Bluey is a high bar, and I wanted enough space to write about each of these without going 5,000 words deep (as it is, this entry is well over 2,000).
So it became a four-parter. Tiers 2-4 came before, and today it’s Tier 1 — the top 20 episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 of Bluey, the best made-for-kids show ever made.
(Miss the rankings so far? Check them out: Episodes 104-77 | Episodes 76-49 | Episodes 48-21)
#20: Baby Race, Ep. 2.50
It’s a cartoon. It’s not there to make you cry. But if you’re a parent, this one might make you cry. “Happy tears,” as they say, but still, it’s a make-you-cry episode for sure.
#19: Double Babysitter, Ep. 2.39
The beauty of this show is that some episodes can be about how a little girl deals with her baby sister being premature and needing to stay in the NICU, and other episodes can be about how grandma watches scary shows too loud, and they are of equal importance, because everything is important for children. I feel like Uncle Rad was a good addition to the show, basically what Bandit might have turned into if he hadn’t gotten serious and started a family.
#18: Movies, Ep. 2.29
Taking 4-year-olds to the movies is disastrous. Bandit is a saint to take two kids by himself. If Laurie and I take the boys to the movies, we try to have an extra adult — or at least the 11-year-old — with us.
#17: Army, Ep. 2.16
Is “the Army is the best place for a young ADHD-afflicted child to learn to corral the issues and get better as a person” a weird message? Yep. Does that make this episode any less delightful? Nope.
#16: Flat Pack, Ep. 2.24
Two episodes before this is a story about … being silly on a make-believe bus. A couple before that is kids pretending to be crabs. So sure, extended parable about evolution and humanity’s journey to heaven, why not, makes total sense.
(I don’t care, this is charming as all hell.)
#15: Barky Boats, Ep. 2.31
Because I am a broken person, I have wondered if the creators of the show have final pairings in mind. I’ve decided that they do, and this episode only cemented it with the Bluey/Mackenzie open (and, you know, the parallels of the whole story). Bluey and Mackenzie will end up together (unless Jean-Luc sneaks in there). Honey and Judo will end up together. Indy and Rusty. Clearly, Captain and Mia.
Anyway, this is real cute. I wanna play Barky Boats.
#14: Seesaw, Ep. 2.28
For the most part in Bluey, dogs are dogs. Sure, Snickers is a sausage dog so his proportions are weird, but child dogs are basically the same size, adult dogs are basically the same size. Heck, Pom-Pom’s mom (Mom-Pom?) is more or less the same size as Chilli and Bandit. There are exceptions (Winton, Hercules), but size just isn’t that important a facet of the dogs’ characterizations in Bluey … except when it is, like in this one. “The smallest one makes the difference” is very fun, and I hope Pom-Pom’s appearances in Season 3 show more of her deterimination.
#13: Squash, Ep. 2.04
I’m the youngest of 5, and not by a little — my closest sibling is more than 7 years older than me, and the oldest has me by 12 and a half years. I am intimately familiar with “big brothers always beat little brothers.” Stripe’s triumph here, even if it’s a bit farfetched — Bandit won so handily the first time that it’s hard to imagine a mere confidence swing is enough — is (as illustrated in the show) a victory for little siblings everywhere.
#12: Keepy Uppy, Ep. 1.03
When Encanto first landed on Disney+, we watched it one day while I was working, so I wasn’t paying close attention. My only real takeaway was that Stephanie Beatriz playing both Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Mirabel was a funny juxtaposition of roles. But the kids liked it, so we watched it again … and again … and again. Eventually, I realized I actually liked the movie, the songs were bangers, it totally worked. But I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened; it was just sort of a gradual growing appreciation.
It wasn’t at all that way with Bluey. It was a “cute show that the kids like and I can ignore” for a while, until the first time I paid attention to “Keepy Uppy.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of all the members of the family along with a game that every kid has played a thousand times. It is utterly charming, and it tells a complete story within the span of the time it takes to play “don’t let the balloon hit the ground.” And then bringing it back around with the “blow up and release” game? Just sublime. I fell in love with Bluey right here.
#11: Duck Cake, Ep. 2.44
I can make a decent loaf of bread. Not, like, “open my own bakery” decent, but “when I show up at a gathering with some homemade bread people get excited” decent, and that’s fair. The number of cakes I’ve made in my life, though, is somewhere under 5, and it might be 0. Still, I’ve watched enough Food Network baking shows that I keep having these ideas that I just need to start practicing with a boxed mix and in no time I’ll be Duff Goldman-ing my way to the top. In a sense, it’s not unlike the feelings I had before my first times golfing, that I’ve seen it done and I’m reasonably athletic, hey, maybe I’ll be a natural. And then I shot a 140-something on my first round of 18 ever and realized nope, something else I’m bad at.
Anyway, I know he’s just a cartoon, but I appreciate Bandit disabusing me of the notion that I can suddenly be a cake master just because I know who Buddy Valastro is and I own a stand mixer.
#10: Camping, Ep. 1.43
Basically by definition, we can never see Jean-Luc again in the series, barring a big-time flash forward, and that makes me kinda sad, because he was such a fun character, utterly incapable of communicating verbally with his new friend but figuring it out nonetheless. I feel like I say this in every one of these, but damn this show is so charming.
#9: Shadowlands, Ep. 1.05
Shadowlands is basically the in-the-park version of The Floor Is Lava, which Bluey plays in another episode. I very much enjoy the creativity the writers in finding ways for them to go shadow-to-shadow (especially the bus, that was genius), but the cloud cover was pretty deus ex machina-y. One of the kids (I feel like Snickers, who (a) wasn’t as flight of fancy as Bluey but (b) wasn’t as “let’s break the rules” as Coco) should have raised the question of what they’d do when they get to the end of the shadow of the palm tree, because there was super nowhere to go.
Small nitpick though, because this is very cute.
#8: Handstand, Ep. 2.45
I love that the show made this and “Duck Cake” basically a two-parter, with the cake tying the two together. But now I want a whole serialized season of Bluey told a la 24, and I doubt we’ll ever get that.
Anyway, the frustration of a small child to be seen and a senior citizen to be seen as useful are both pretty universal things, and combining them through joining timelines is pretty great. (And I mentioned this before, but the showrunners being like “Oh crap, we forgot Muffin and Socks and Lila, uh, they were watching TV in the other room” is hilarious.)
#7: The Pool, Ep. 1.22
I’m a decent enough dad. When I pack the boys up to take them places by myself, I try to pack everything, because that’s the deal. But when they were in diapers, I sometimes forgot diapers. I’ve forgotten changes of clothes. I’ve forgotten sunscreen. I don’t know if that’s a “dad” thing or a “parent” thing, but … I mean, it happens all the damn time, y’all.
#6: Bike, Ep. 1.11
The way Muffin gets into her backpack is kind of silly, because a backpack isn’t two-dimensional and she’d have struggled squirming like she did without moving the back … but I don’t care, this episode is fantastic, and using those three little stories as “Bluey is determined to ride a bike” is such a cool way to bring it back around. Maybe their struggles were what I needed.
#5: The Quiet Game, Ep. 2.37
At first, I thought Bandit offering the kids ice cream just because he knew they weren’t talking felt unnecessarily mean. Funny, but mean. But then I realized that without that, the girls probably would have agreed to a pause in the Quiet Game to help him, but since he had messed with them, they were going to mess with him. And that just makes it delicious.
I doubt we ever see Alfie again, because he wasn’t a “character” so much as a “plot device,” but that’s okay; his one appearance was very endearing.
#4: Grandad, Ep. 2.27
My mother is 70. As I write this, she’s in Massachusetts with my daughter and my niece and nephew (all 11 or 12 years old). She drove the three of them up all by herself for a week on the lake, full of trampolining, swimming, kayaking, and general outdoor-fun-having. My sister flew up and joined them at some point, so at least my mom will have some driving help for the return trip. Still though — 70-year-old woman, solo, driving 1,000-plus miles to spend a week mostly outdoors with three of the most energetic creatures on the planet is a damn feat. Mom’s gonna slow down eventually, but it’s very fun that she hasn’t yet.
That’s what I think of every time I see Grandad. That, and how much I want to see Maynard (“Is it the aliens?!”) pop up again.
#3: Escape, Ep. 2.21
About a decade ago, we were staying at my uncle’s lake house (just mentioned that in the last episode, but this was an inadvertent callback), and my niece (then about 6?) came out to tell us a dream she had had about zombies and their methods of stopping them, and it became increasingly outlandish and also increasingly clear this wasn’t a dream, this was a story she was making up as she went along. And then she appeared to realize she had no way to end the story, and so she kind of paused for a second and said, “And then we ran out of resources to power the science, the end.” My brother and I have dropped “We ran out of resources to power the science” into random conversations ever since, because it’s such a ridiculous phrase.
Anyway, Bluey and Bingo’s imagination (yes, actually the writers’) tops 6-year-old Grace’s. Also, I love that Bandit gets so caught up in the adventure that he accidentally helps the girls beat them.
#2: Bin Night, Ep. 2.42
Think about everything that happens in this episode:
We learn that the neighborhood does trash weekly, but recycling biweekly.
We meet Doreen and learns she plays mah-jongg.
We learn that not only does Bluey do martial arts, she advances at least one belt level.
We see Bingo go from meeting a new kid, to fighting with the new kid, to bonding with the new kid, to being friends with the new kid.
We see Bluey quasi-antagonize a crow and the crow get its revenge.
We learn that Bandit confides in Chilli at night about what Bingo tells him and Chilli attempts to solve it.
We see how supportive the parents are, encouraging Bluey to work toward whatever aspiration she switches to next.
We see Bluey’s scientific acumen come into play, charting the trash/recycling schedule against the phases of the moon.
We learn that taking the trash out with the girls is Bandit’s favorite thing.
They crammed all of that into, what, seven and a half minutes? Along with jokes? Along with a bin man and truck that was so popular it was made into its own toy set? This thing is incredible.
#1: Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound, Ep. 1.32
I didn’t know for the longest time that this is actually a more-than-fair adaptation of the story of Kisa Gotami, and it’s apparently one of the most famous stories in Buddhism. That only adds to how good this is overall. Bingo’s in the hospital. She’s sad and thinks it’s unfair, but the doctor doesn’t want to send her home yet. Bluey and Bandit, along with the aunt and uncle and cousins and friends, make a video about how everybody gets sick sometimes. It’s the sweetest thing in the world. It lifts Bingo’s spirits. And it’s genuinely funny! I could watch this episode 10,000 times. It’s one of the best segments of TV — of any kind of show, for any age group, at any point in history — I’ve ever seen.