If you are a Bluey fan, you will know all too well that we are in the midst of a confusing limbo. The last proper Bluey episode aired in spring 2024. There is a Bluey movie coming out in summer 2027. Between them is a long, dry gap of three years, three months and 16 days.

But Bluey is a machine that needs to be fed. There are Bluey books to be sold, Bluey records to be bought, Bluey toys and games and Lego sets and magazines and shoes and drinkware and gnomes and bedding and bandages and pyjama sets and 550-watt Bluey Mini Waffle Makers that need to be shifted. It’s hard to sell all this product when Bluey has no centre of gravity, and so, with a measured amount of excitement, here comes a new set of minisodes.

It is best to essentially consider minisodes as a kind of Bluey methadone. Much shorter in form than Bluey proper – the longest minisodes come in at three minutes, with some only lasting one or two – they are a kind of sketch comedy version of the show, with weird little premises playing out simply. This is the second batch of minisodes to hit the air since the full series went dark and, like the previous run, they are perfectly acceptable.

Pick of the bunch of this new crop is Cinderella, which is simply a scene where Bandit tries to remember the story of Cinderella at bedtime, and makes up all sorts of strange new details. Also a standout is Honk, where Stripe plays a game with his children that (spoiler alert) ends on a note of uncharacteristic violence. What’s great about these episodes is that they feel like Bluey, to the point that they feel like moments from existing episodes that were cut for time.

At their best, the minisodes allow the show to indulge in a little more weirdness than the main show would allow. One of the new episodes, Tea Party, succeeds because it wanders off down a detailed and very specific discussion of tea etiquette. However, the minisodes are also so throwaway that there’s a lot of chaff.

Four of the 10 episodes released are simply characters singing nursery rhymes, and another consists solely of characters dancing wordlessly to music from old episodes. These are much harder to justify, because they are essentially Bluey Does Cocomelon, and the appeal of Bluey has always been that it is everything Cocomelon is not.

At its best, Bluey was always the most ambitious show on television. Take the episode Flat Pack, where two cartoon dogs track all of civilisation from prehistory right through to a post-human utopia in the space of seven minutes. Or Sleepytime, which manages to say more about children preparing themselves for the death of a parent than any book ever written. When Bluey really stretched its legs, with the 28-minute special The Sign, the result was kaleidoscopic; so sweet and cleverly structured that the emotional obliteration of its final few minutes hit like a truck.

Every episode felt different. They all had a different feel, a different emotional tenor, a different score by Joff Bush. They felt expansive in a way that a minisode – especially a minisode where a character sings Ten Green Bottles and nothing else happens – cannot.

This is a crucial time for Bluey. Next year’s film potentially represents the final time that creator Joe Brumm will write for Bluey. Everything good about the show – its warmth, its cross-generational appeal, its entire worldview – came from him. I have a very, very tangential relationship with the show, and I saw how Brumm was able to take my mediocre, surface-level idea and transform it into a touching, confounding, time-jumping masterpiece. He is a unique talent.

The big question is how Bluey will contend with his absence. There is a version of the show that is able to successfully mimic his approach in such a way that only true Bluey nerds will notice a difference, like when Larry David left Seinfeld. But there is also a version of the show that looks and sounds like these minisodes – familiar characters moving around with no real pulse – and that would be disastrous.

As a piece of filler to keep people buying merch until new episodes are ready, the Bluey minisodes are fine. But if they are a sign of the direction the show is about to move into, it might be time to get worried about the future.