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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Different Bluey episodes resonate with different people for different reasons, but the Cricket episode from Season 3 is just about as perfect an episode of a kid's show as I've ever seen. In about 7 minutes it manages to tackle how being passionate about one of your interests or hobbies and sticking with it even when you experience setbacks pays off.

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Cricket is, bar none, the best episode of children's television ever produced. (Chess is also _fantastic_.) It's so good, I've made adults watch it without a child in the room. It's a perfect short story: the backstory character development, the heartstring-pulling deployed father, the overcoming challenges and stepping into them, the letting his sister have a win, the adults recognizing that's what he's done, and then the coup de grace, the flash forward to Rusty as a professional cricket player. "_That's_ what cricket's about, kid."

It's brilliant at every level. Such a perfect piece of television, told in this flawless 7 minutes.

Personally, i find all episodes with flash forwards choke me up. However, i mostly agree, cricket is a particularly good one.

The way they leave it up to the viewer to infer the reason Rusty practiced cricket on so many different surfaces was because his dad was stationed in Iraq in the Australian Army and therefore wasn’t around to pick him up after school is heart-wrenching, perfect writing.

But even if you remove that element - something I think all of us can relate to is loving a sport or a hobby so much as a kid that you use every free moment you have doing it, practicing it, getting better at it. I felt a similar way about basketball as a kid; and even though I didn't play much past high school, I saw a bit of my younger self in Rusty.

my god cricket is the best episode, and it’s crazy that no information about any character is even remotely needed to appreciate it

the authors created a great character in rusty

Fun fact, Rusty was originally going to be the main character. And if you put Bluey next to Rusty, you'll see they're the same shape, just colored differently.

And yeah, absolutely amazing episode.

I'll echo this for anyone else in the comments -- You can watch the cricket episode with 0 knowledge of the show and 0 knowledge of cricket. If you haven't ever seen Bluey - it's a great example as to why so many speak so highly of it. If you haven't seen bluey but want to see what the fuss is (and especially if you have any interest in sports) -- it's only 7 minutes long and absolutely worth watching.

The cricket episode is so good! It gets me everytime.

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