Stuck Inside? Here’s an Australian Kids’ Show Every Parent Can Love

“Bluey” is the country’s biggest children’s TV export since “The Wiggles,” speaking with rare frankness to young and old. SYDNEY, Australia — Joe Brumm’s daughter was 3 when she was first admitted to a hospital with an asthma-like illness. She spent a week in intensive care. “When she gets a cold, her lungs shut down,” said Brumm, the creator of “Bluey,” a wildly popular Australian children’s cartoon for 5- to 7-year-olds.

In “Bluey,” Brumm, 41, has turned moments from his own family life into a series of seven-minute episodes. These range from mundane squabbles, chores and playtime to more troubling situations, like his daughter’s hospital visit. The difference is, onscreen, it’s a family of dogs. In a country of just 25 million people, the show has been streamed over 200 million times, making it the most popular program ever on ABC iview, the Australian public broadcaster’s on-demand service.

And this week, “Bluey” won an International Emmy Kids Award for the best preschool program, with the winners announced online because of the coronavirus pandemic and the cancellation of the awards ceremony in Cannes. “Bluey” started to go global last year. Disney purchased the rights for the series, and it premiered on Disney Junior in the United States in September, and is now on Disney+. Youku, a Chinese streaming service, is showing it dubbed into Mandarin.

“Bluey” speaks with a rare frankness and authenticity not only about the experience of being a child, but, also, being a parent. If it becomes as much of a hit abroad as at home, “Bluey” could rival “The Wiggles” as Australia’s most popular children’s cultural export. The dog family lives in a suburban home in Brisbane with palm trees, colorful birds and endless sunny days — not to mention the city’s quintessential “Queenslander” houses, with corrugated iron roofs and shady verandas. Jane Gould, Disney’s senior vice president of content strategy and insights, said that the Australian setting and the characters’ strong accents weren’t an issue for young viewers in the United States, but that they would have been in the past.

“Our kids live in a much more global community than the adults do,” Gould said, adding that, because of the internet, children nowadays have heard a broader variety of voices. Daley Pearson, a co-founder of Ludo Studio, which produced the show, said “Bluey” was “a show for parents who hate kids’ shows. ” He described it as a mixture of “Peppa Pig” and “Family Guy” — minus the latter’s vulgarity. “I think kids can handle a lot of stuff more than film and TV writers give them credit for,” Pearson added.