As a Brit living in the US, I'm jealous. My comparative experience was seeing Peppa Pig for the first time. And it's crap.
I'd argue Bluey is "a better Peppa": similar kind of humor (slightly more elaborate, but not by a lot) but with great artwork.
Meanwhile Bandit talks and acts like a real person would - well, at least one with top-tier parenting skills.
So yeah, don't take Bandit as the benchmark for being decent, but as something to aspire to.
I figure that in a world where good role models are lacking for men in so many ways, here's a good one.
My kids will watch it, if someone like Grandma or the neighbor put it on, but their attention wanders. Bluey? They stay locked on for the entire duration of the episode
Should I keep going?
Its weird - I know about little american towns like Boulder, Colorado. I've never been there. But I know what it looks like because its featured - or at least mentioned - in plenty of movies and shows.
But the population of Boulder is just 100k. Australia has lots of way bigger cities - like Brisbane, Queensland (population 2.8 million) or Perth, WA (2.4 million) that are never depicted on screen. Even on Australian TV, I basically never see brissie or perth shown at all. I only know what they look like because I've visited.
But maybe that's normal in the english speaking world - at least outside the US. We've gotta raise our game and make more good content.
I can't recognize Brisbane (and visiting it would feel like visiting Bluey).
Producers are SCARED of using unrecognizable areas (and/or for live-action, just film near where everyone is located).
If it makes you feel better, the USA has tons of large cities - far north of 100k, north of 1 million (especially if considering urban areas), that rarely or ever get featured in TV or movies; and if they do, it's often older ones.
Which is sad, mind you. Every city should have its own feel (too many places now feel like suburbs of Los Angeles, even in Europe or Asia), its own beer, its own food, its own media and music.
Eh, lumping the gold-coast in with Brisbane is easy enough. Tanned bodies, barrel waves, way more tourists than you expect... it's basically California except it faces east, not west.
That said, agreed with the GP - places like Boulder, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or New Orleans are places that we know about through culture and are internationally recognised, while being much smaller than Australian cities. That's mostly a factor of a huge amount of English-speaking media being from the US.
Australia attempts to counter this through laws requiring a certain quota of Australian content in the media, but that hasn't really worked - and is one of the factors which spawned many Australian reality TV shows.
I visited Edinburgh a couple years ago and was blown away by the city and its people. God, everyone I met was so funny and interesting. But it’s almost never depicted on tv, outside of the occasional BBC crime drama or something. And those usually don’t get much air time outside of the UK. Peaky blinders has done an amazing job telling some of the history of Birmingham. I want more of that! The world is just so big and interesting. Far bigger than Hollywood will ever bother to portray.
You might have heard of Aberdeen I guess. But have you heard of Geelong in Australia?
American here. Literally the only thing I know about Stoke on Trent is that Messi would struggle there during a cold rainy night.