-Short episodes are amazing
-Most characters are really good
-A small set of characters appear very frequently, and most get forgotten
-Joke explanations get tiring real quickly
Gintama is a series that is, at it's best, a really emotional or absolutely hilarious anime. Because of that it really is a shame, that something with the potential to be this good could end up making me feel tired even before starting an episode.
Gintama is an episodic series, kind of. It's divided by very short arcs, with the longest ones going for around 5 or 6 episodes, and most of them being half or a full episode long. There are arcs that introduce characters, arcs that further the plot and "filler" arcs, which are actually the bread and butter of the show. They're often comedic one-offs that set up a funny situation, and end with a great punchline which is often kind of endearing at the same time.
You can see that this kind of approach does not work very well if the runtime is longer, because there is nothing really interesting in the middle. There is a clear setup, but once you understand where it's going, there is usually not really a point in keeping it going for another episode, let alone two or three. (This is the main reason why, in my opinion, the best "arcs" are the ones that last half an episode)
But Gintama does this anyway. Now how, one may ask, do they keep rolling a joke about the main characters going to an underwater palace to stop a pervert turtle for 4 episodes? The answer, lies in one of the shows main strengths: it's fantastic roster of characters.
Everyone in this series has a story of their own, and a very well-defined personality (even if that personality is an annoying mess) which makes you think how they would react to different situations and how they get along with different characters. You could say the main focus of Gintama is exploring these relationships, while also taking the audience for a fun ride.
The problem is, as the series stretches and the amount of characters increases, there are some that get forgotten, and some that we want to forget but can't because they are on screen every two episodes. Some have been played to death like MADAO, while others like Sakamoto are barely touched upon.
That's without even mentioning the main way in which Gintama shoots itself in the foot with the ever present joke-explainer character (Usually but not always, Shinpachi).
In comedy, subtlety is king. It's what separates old Simpsons from new Simpsons, it's what makes laugh tracks so damn annoying. If you have to explain a joke, it's usually not that funny. And my grudge with the show is that it's one of the exceptions to that rule of thumb: it's funny despite the explanation... and yet it explains it.
Gintama is obsessed with letting everyone know: "Hey! I just made a joke! This is the joke right here!". It's even worse than a laugh track because you don't even have the opportunity to think about what the joke is, they say it right there in front of you.
I'm pretty sure this problem radicates in the fact that, after all is said and done, this is still a show for kids (which is still a condescending attitude, but I can kind-of understand it). The manga probably does a better job in not making Shinpachi so damn annoying by shouting things mid-sentence because you can stop reading his dialogue, but that doesn't fly in anime.
I'm pretty sure that if you cut out most of Shinpachi's lines, the show would have a much better flow and would be much funnier. Though that would leave too much time that the episode would need to fill- wait, that sounds familiar...
That's right, my old point: the best episodes are the half-episodes. They are the most densely packed, fast-paced, joke-explanation-free episodes out there. These are the ones that remind me why I love Gintama in the first place. I just wish more of them were like this. But as the series stretches more and more, these episodes become less frequent.
