Cowboy Bebop has great characters, rich stories, beautiful art, and some of the best music I've ever seen in an anime. The main plot is limited to a small portion of the 26 episodes leaving the other episodes to be largely self contained stories.In this way it is similar to other shows like Gintama that are structured primarily episodaly. This allows the creators to experiment on every episode with a variety of genres and themes while exploring and developing characters and giving you glimpses of a beautiful and clearly very vast world.
The episodal nature of the anime while being one of its greatest strengths is also its greatest weakness and a small number of episodes are definite misses especially when it comes to the quality of the rest of the anime. However, as these are all stand alone episodes these shortfalls don't detract from the rest of the anime and if you wanted to could easily be skipped.
