Like many families, we have a “no TV before school” rule, but our resolve has been sorely tested by the arrival of Bluey, a new Australian cartoon that runs at 8am weekdays on ABC Kids.

My family aren’t alone in our fandom – since Bluey first aired in October this year, it’s proved extremely popular. The 26 episodes available on ABC iView have been watched 11 million times combined in the last month, and at the time of writing it was the most popular Australian-made program for children under four on the ABC Kids channel. This means that, at the moment, Bluey is being watched more than the Wiggles or Play School. So what’s the appeal?

Bluey follows a blue heeler pup who lives with her parents and her four-year-old sister, Bingo, in Brisbane. Mundane activities like going to the shops and visiting the doctor become an opportunity for imaginative play. Children’s television is awash with cartoons in which talking animals learn life lessons, but Bluey stands out from the blur of daytime television with its sharp script, its Brisbane setting and its ability to plumb the unexpected depths of everyday family life.

The seven-minute episodes are entirely made in Brisbane by Ludo Studio and written by Joe Brumm, whose previous work includes the British animated series Charlie and Lola. The idea for Bluey started around three years ago, when Brumm approached the studio about writing a program based on his own experiences of fatherhood.

Bluey conjures up the magic of childhood without being schmaltzy. Photograph: ABC TV

“It’s an observational show about Joe’s family life, and some of mine too,” Bluey producer Charlie Aspinwall tells Guardian Australia. “When kids are at the top end of preschool they experience the world for themselves through unstructured play. It’s one of the most fun times to be a dad. You might be having breakfast and your youngest will be pretending to be a frog. Yet somehow you need to get the ‘frog’ out of the door in the next half hour. There’s so much comedy in how parents deal with difficult situations.”

The result is an offbeat, hilarious and tender show that captures the joy and frustration of parenthood in equal measure. Bluey’s father – voiced by Dave McCormack, frontman of the band Custard – is laconic, playful and certainly more emotionally intelligent than, say, Peppa Pig’s hapless dad. His relationship with his daughters forms much of the tension – and humour – in the show, which manages to somehow conjure up the magic of childhood without being schmaltzy.

Ludo Studio pitched a pilot of Bluey at the Asian Animation Summit in 2016. The ABC’s Michael Carrington was in the audience and felt the pilot captured everything he’d been pushing for at the ABC. “We hadn’t seen much Australian animation since Bananas In Pyjamas or Blinky Bill. This pilot was sensational, full of Australian colour and light. I made an immediate approach, but [producer of the Emmy award-winning animation Hey Duggee] Henrietta Hurford-Jones from BBC Studio was there too and asked to be let in on the deal. She could see Bluey had universal appeal,” he tells Guardian Australia.

Social realism meets slapstick: an excursion to buy Chinese food goes awry in Bluey. Photograph: ABC TV

The early response to Bluey in Australia would suggest that instinct was correct. Dry humour and vivid domestic detail packs each tightly scripted episode. In an episode called Takeaway, an excursion to buy Chinese food goes awry. Social realism meets slapstick as a child’s urgent need for a wee creates chaos while the family waits for their spring rolls. Yet the dynamic shifts in the last few moments of the episode, when Bluey’s father has an epiphany about the fleeting nature of childhood. For once, it isn’t the children in a cartoon learning a life lesson, but the parents.

My daughter and I have watched this episode several times and the ending makes me cry each time. My daughter thinks this is weird but I’m relieved to find I’m not alone – many parents on online forums have confessed to weeping into their cornflakes at the unexpected poignancy of this episode. Indeed, Aspinwall says the studio has been receiving daily fan mail from parents who enjoy the program as much as their children do.

The Wiggles are often called Australia’s biggest cultural export but could Bluey become a similarly global hit? The program will be screened on the BBC’s CBeebies preschool channel soon. BBC Studios holds the rights outside of Australia and are likely to do a deal that takes Bluey to the world.

The ABC will release 26 more episodes of Bluey in 2019, which doesn’t bode well for my family’s “no TV before school” rule. Still, it’s the kind of thing I can imagine featuring in one of those seven-minute episodes – a tiny, recognisable feature of ordinary family life, made remarkable.