Bluey, and the hierarchy of distractions

Pleasant surprises can be rare in life, so when you find one, it’s worth holding onto it.

Pre-child I was expecting a world where one of my main jobs as a parent was to protect our daughter from algorithmically generated content.

Think full screen bans to avoid the millions of hours of content out there, surgically designed to melt her brain in the most efficient way.

The reality, however, is quite different. There are only two shows that catch her interest: Peppa Pig and Bluey.

Having now sat through quite a lot of both of these, they’re both far from the AI generated slop of my nightmares.

Take Bluey, created by Joe Brumm, an early Peppa Pig animator..

In 2009 Brumm moved back to Brisbane, and sought to improve the original Peppa Pig formula, this time with a family of four anthropomorphised Heeler dogs. The result was Bluey.

Bluey is a true auteur’s game.

Brumm writes each episode, and refused point blank to let the BBC and Disney use locally-accented voice actors to replace the Australian cast.

There’s experimentation with both form and tone: a number of the episodes contain no dialogue at all, whilst one of the most recent episodes ran to 30 minutes (against a usual 6).

Brumm is obsessed with bringing what he calls “the craft thing” to children’s TV:

“We really tried to get it to look beautiful and to sound beautiful. It should have its own score and its own visual style and really not just be about trying to knock it out for cheap.”

The result? The most dominant TV show in the world. The #1 TV show streamed in the US in 2023.

It overtook previous champion Cocomelon, a show much more aligned with my pre-child fears of algorithmic TV (for an excellent pasting read this).

What shows like Bluey and Peppa Pig have is to have created a hierarchy of quality in kids TV.

For a parent it's excellent: when moments for screens arise (say whilst travelling, or whilst making dinner), instead of fighting for a blanket ban, I can just push my kids' viewing habits further up the hierarchy.

This concept - of a hierarchy of distraction - extends far beyond the realm of children's TV.

It's a struggle that many of us face in our daily lives, in a world that feels ever more distracting.

Zadie Smith has written openly about this challenge, one that most of us can empathise with. In a 2010 interview, she noted:

“There are plenty of days when you lose the whole day to the internet and that’s just what happens. It’s depressing.”

I can’t find the exact interview, so I’m paraphrasing, but in another she set out her solution to this problem - stop fighting her desire for distraction, and focus instead, on seeking higher ground:

“You’ll always be distracted, so why not spend your time and energy making sure you’re distracted by something good.”

This I think is a much healthier, and attainable pattern for all of us.

Because going all in is a failure mode we all make regularly.

People who want to get in shape try to make exercise our passion, rather than accepting we’ll always hate it, and scheduling a few simple things that'll get us 80% of the way there.

It’s the same with distraction. Instead of trying to block out screens entirely, and live the life of a 21st century monk, embrace the distraction, and shape it instead.

Fortunately, I think the internet here is rapidly becoming more a help than a hindrance.

The internet of 2010 that Smith loses whole days to became the internet of horizontal consumer apps: Facebook; Instagram; Snapchat; TikTok.

These were obviously amazing time sinks - perfect for low-intent grazing, sinking hours into doing nothing. This is what I mean by a low quality distraction.

For all these platforms, usage has peaked, a lot of the mechanics necessary for them to grow no longer exist, and a lot of the action seems to have shifted to trusted peer to peer networks (read: group chats).

As that distraction fades away, where does all the unexpended attention go? Deep vertical content with strong followings.

Tonight Acquired - a podcast specialising in 3 hour plus deep dives into businesses - have sold out the Chase Center (capacity 18,000).

Everywhere I turn over the past few weeks, people are talking about the Rest is History’s eight part series on the French Revolution (someone was literally playing it, no headphones, on a London bus, yesterday).

It’s not only nerdy subjects either, there’s an incredible depth of coverage, research, and content that’s spun up around so many things.

Rich Eisen talked recently on a podcast about how NFL coverage has changed during his time covering the sport:

“ESPN sportscenter went from [a show telling viewers what happened in sport that day] to assuming anybody watching had already seen the game, knew the results, and had seen highlights of it multiple times.”

The result - a world where the barriers to being an enthusiast are lower than ever - is ever more interest: the Ravens Chiefs game was the most-watched regular-season opener ever, averaging 28.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock.

It’s the reason why the foundational promise of so many products today - from Substack to NFL Game pass - is that they’re able to offer you a fundamentally better class of distraction.

I don’t even think that a better class of distraction necessarily means high-brow, or educational.

For me it’s much more about it being something that genuinely fixes your full attention.

Spending time with your kids, great distraction. Getting drawn into an audiobook, also a great distraction. Inattentive scrolling (we all know that zoned out feeling), a bad distraction.

Find yourself drifting? Just swap it for a better distraction.

It’s that ability - attentiveness - that so much of us miss, and that a focus on simply climbing up the hierarchy of distraction, as best we can, can bring back.

Be fatalistic. Accept that not all distractions are created equal. And instead of trying to escape distraction, focus instead on mastering it.

aled@ashore.io

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Once a week I write about lessons in building from unexpected places. You can see the rest of what I write, and sign up to my email - Crossover Creativity - here.