While we’re waiting for Heroes season 2 to be completed before we start watching it, we wife and I have been hunting for something interesting to watch on a regular basis. We tried an episode of CSI: Miami at first, but it was so atrociously bad that I refused to watch any more of it. Slow-motion scenes which serve to do nothing but show how cool the main characters look? Pointlessly violent and unrealistic gunfights? Super-technical solutions that are improbably illustrated with pretty 3D graphics? Please no. As I recall series star David Caruso first made a name for himself in the highly regarded NYPD Blue, which was a well-written police drama that focused on character development. CSI: Miami is simply inane and shallow in comparison.

Another option we had was season 3 of Prison Break. Both of us enjoyed the first season of Prison Break well enough. I liked it for its interesting mix of characters, the novelty of being set in a prison with the attendant details of prison life and the cleverness of Michael Scofield’s plans to break his brother out. By the second season though, the complexity of Scofield’s turned from being clever to being ridiculously over-engineered and I hated how the plot just seemed to run everywhere in order to keep both brothers as fugitives. Character development was also sacrificed to keep the plot twists going and going. We might watch season 3, but only if we’re really, really bored.

So my wife and I started to watch Bleach since one of my colleagues had like a hundred episodes of it in his computer. It turned out to be so good that we just can’t stop watching what happens next in the adventures of Kurosaki Ichigo and friends. Just last night I was discussing with my wife about the different abilities of the characters’ various zanpakuto weapons and the personal quirks of each of the shinigami captains, like whether or not Kuchiki Byakuya’s senbon sakura move counts as cheating, and my wife suddenly remarked, “Hey, we’re discussing a cartoon, just like kids!”

But really it’s a great cartoon. The basic story starts out familiar enough with a teenage boy in Japan discovering the existence of a spirit world intertwined with material reality and gains powers to deal with threats from the spirit world. The appeal though comes from the straightforward but engaging storytelling that keeps things moving nicely along together with nice changes of pacing to add character development, backstory and humour as needed. It helps a lot that the fight scenes are all so cool and the abilities of the characters so varied but if it were simply a matter of Ichigo facing a different monster every episode and learning to defeat it, it would simply be boring. Instead, as the series goes on, it introduces a broader cast of interesting characters and delves ever deeper into the workings of the spirit world. Even the light-hearted omake scenes at the end of each episodes after the credits are fun.

I can see that how it can become too formulaic if it drags on for too long. Even now, it seems that Ichigo gets just about cut in half in every hard fight but ends up learning from it and it increases his powers tremendously. In the meantime, it’s a fun ride and since we’re still watching the Soul Society rescue arc, the mystery of who killed Captain Aizen and who the real bad guys are have us glued to the screen. Ok, enough blogging and time to get back to watching Ichigo kick more ass with zangetsu.