Opinion | Bluey' is so good I keep watching it on my own

Spending time with my grandchildren at the beach this summer, I inevitably found myself watching a lot of family television programs.

I saw some dreadful, cheaply made shows. (I would be happy to never view another episode of “My Little Pony.”) And I was transfixed by one sublimely great series, the Australian television program “Bluey,” about a soulful family of dogs, about which more later.

What I missed during this summer’s binge-watching were shows that might have helped our family laugh — the adults and children together — at some of the absurdities of this moment in our national politics. The very idea seems almost impossible these days. Donald Trump? Race and gender issues? MAGA madness? What’s funny here?

Let’s do a little time travel (which seems to be a remarkably common feature of children’s entertainment these days) and recall another divisive moment in our national life when creative voices managed to find common ground. Of course (yawn from my children and grandchildren) I’m talking about the bad-old boomer days of the early 1970s.

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The country certainly seemed as if it was coming apart back then. Construction workers were beating up hippie antiwar demonstrators. College students like me were spouting revolutionary jargon. And there was a powerful backlash from “middle America” to the transformative civil rights and sexual liberation movements of the time. Vice President Spiro Agnew was calling liberal critics “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

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And then along came a racist White man from Queens named Archie Bunker, his lovably flaky wife, Edith, his proto-feminist daughter, Gloria, and her student-radical husband, known as Meathead. This was “All in the Family,” one of the greatest TV shows ever, in my opinion, because it allowed us to laugh at our prejudices and preconceptions.

“All in the Family” ran from 1971 to 1979. It could be infuriating. Archie really was a racist jerk. He derisively called his wife “dingbat.” But he loved her, and Meathead, too. The show managed to help people think openly and tolerantly about very divisive issues of the day — racial justice, antisemitism, gay rights, women’s liberation. And in the process it managed to be sweet, sentimental and funny.

Prime-time television was aimed at whole families in those days — the whole country, really — and it thrived while taking on racial and social issues. Sometimes the plots were Dickensian stories of rags-to-riches dislocation. “Diff’rent Strokes,” featuring the young wisecracking actor Gary Coleman, imagined two Harlem boys who had come to live with a rich businessman on Park Avenue. It ran on NBC and ABC from 1978 to 1986. A grittier look at inner-city life was “Good Times,” set in a public-housing project in Chicago. Jimmie Walker played the goofy J.J. during the show’s run on CBS from 1974 to 1979.

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The real experience of women battling sexual discrimination and harassment was dramatized, with laughter as well as pain and anger, in the unforgettable “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which debuted in 1970.

The ’80s brought “The Cosby Show.” Accusations against star Bill Cosby of egregious sexual behavior make it hard to think about that show now, but during its run from 1984 to 1992, it presented a powerful picture of Black people as upper-middle-class professionals. Cosby’s character, Cliff Huxtable, was a doctor and his wife, Clair, was a lawyer. The congenial Cosby was America’s favorite dad, until we learned about his alleged off-screen abuses.

Laughing at ourselves reached new heights with “The Simpsons,” which debuted on Fox in 1989 and, remarkably, continues to this day. The main characters on this show — Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie — are national icons. The villains are a devious business tycoon named Mr. Burns and a nasty school principal, Mr. Skinner. Bit characters like Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob are treasures of weirdness.

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“The Simpsons” still manages to find common ground and make jokes about controversial topics while appealing to a broad audience, but there are fewer things like that these days. The media world keeps getting sliced more thinly. Creators don’t strive as much for the something-for-everyone prime-time model these days.

That brings me to this summer’s favorite show, the Australian television series “Bluey.” In the way that it spans generations, it’s more like “All in the Family” than you might think. It’s as much about parents as about children — the difficulty getting kids out the door to a play date, the struggle putting them to bed, the precious but fleeting moments of parental sleep. Savvy parents discovered this series soon after it debuted in 2018, and it’s a gem. Like “Sesame Street” or “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” it reminds us just how good and uplifting children’s television can be.

What can I say? After my grandchildren left the beach last weekend, I kept watching episodes of “Bluey” on my own.

Maybe I’m overly sentimental. But I am a sucker for family entertainment that teaches good values, heals social wounds with the balm of laughter and makes you reach for the box of Kleenex. I wish we had more of it.

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