KATE EMERY: I don’t know if Bluey is ending but it should take the chance to go out on a high

I don’t know if this weekend’s bumper Bluey episode will be the last ever. But it should be.

I say this not because I hate the Aussie cartoon phenomenon with the big blue heart but because I love it.

Bluey has followed the lives of the Heeler family for three near-perfect seasons, building in emotional depth with each one, so much so that revisiting the still-charming season one can feel like hopping into a Toyota Yaris after time behind the wheel of a Maserati.

Bluey now has the opportunity to exit on a high like past classics Blackadder, The (UK) Office and Seinfeld, rather than risk staying too long at the party, like The Simpsons, The (US) Office and Friends (a show that should have ended long before Chandler and Monica ever made it down the aisle).

Speculation Bluey could be facing the green dream ratcheted up another notch with its latest episode, which ends on an ominous shot of a For Sale sign outside the Heeler’s family home.

Officially, the word from the Bluey team is that they’ll be taking a break after Sunday’s 28-minute season finale, The Sign, to recharge. The implication being that a fourth season is coming, albeit with the speed of Bluey and Bingo when they’re pretending to be grannies.

But Bluey creator Joe Brumm has been open about his desire that the show not lose its edge, as well as the practical difficulties in working with child actors who are growing faster than their onscreen avatars.

My family are Bluey tragics: this weekend is the equivalent of an AFL grand final where our team is playing — if any of us gave a stuff about footy.

Having daughters the same age as Bluey and Bingo can sometimes invite tricky questions, like how come their parents can’t drop work at a moment’s notice for an all-day bout of imaginative play (the kids) and how can the Heelers afford a heritage Queenslander on the salaries of a archaeologist and an airport security worker (my husband and me).

Still, the show has brought us hours of delight and joy. It’s not just made my husband and I better parents, it’s made our daughters better kids.

But there’s something to be said for always leaving the audience wanting more.

It was even a plotline in Seinfeld in which perpetually hapless George Costanza, taking advice from his titular comedian friend, starts leaving work meetings any time he delivers a crowd-pleasing zinger, reasoning that he’ll only undo his good work if he sticks around.

Seinfeld said of his decision to bow out after nine seasons, despite being offered more than $160m to film one more season: “I have to say, I have a sense of timing. I have it in jokes, I have it in my sets, I have it in my career… And I knew that was our moment.”

Bluey might only have three seasons but it has had 152 episodes: that’s 123 more than Blackadder (if you count the specials) and 138 more than The Office. It’s only 28 episodes fewer than Seinfeld’s nine seasons.

Bluey episodes may only be seven minutes long but, hey, The Great Gatsby was only 48,000 words long — for context that’s less than a tenth as long as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace — and that was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. This is Brumm’s.

Watching a once-great show slide into tepid mediocrity is a depressing experience. It taints not just the lacklustre seasons but the entire show, diluting the joy and esteem in which it’s held until it risks becoming a punchline.

Call it the Robert De Niro effect.

TV shows fail when they start to give the audiences what they think they want, not what they need. It happens when writers pay too much attention to fans and lose the ability to kill their darlings.

Bluey fans might want three more seasons and a movie but is it what we need?

When the theme song kicks in early Sunday morning, I’ll be watching with mixed feelings, half-hoping it’s not the last I’ll see of the Heeler family but knowing it probably should be. For real life.