Certainly, Maria-sama ga Miteru was a pleasant surprise. It's a shoujo with lots of drama. The execution of many parts of the story and characters are just so much better than its competitors.
For a shoujo series with it's first season from 2004, the animation feels dated, but not particularly slow paced. That in itself deserves a lot of praise. And, the series is bold. Usually, in a shoujo show, there's always these introductory arcs that can make or break the show, and they can definitely be a bit tedious, especially when the finale arcs don't particularly warrant the prologue and exposition that you had to slog over. Maria-sama ga Miteru uses a different approach: it goes right into the conflict of characters that you barely know anything about. Sure, this show is all about character development and the drama between their relationships or situations. Yet, despite all of these problems and conflicts that the characters go through in the first season, you barely know too much about them. You see their actions firsthand, some of their inner thoughts, but not much of their personality or background. You barely know anything about these characters other than from the snippets of heated dialogue they have with each other in the first season. The setting is done in a private catholic school, which honestly is just an excuse to have a soeur system, where girls choose to have "little sisters," which is quite essential to character interactions and development, as the relationships between the various sisters in the anime is what brings it to great heights in terms of drama and friendship...and maybe even more than that. Choosing a person as a little sister essentially bonds you to that person for the rest of your high school career, so it's an important choice, and one that people in the show cherish and agonize over.
This unique approach definitely worked. You lack an omniscient viewpoint as the viewer, so you don't always get to know what the characters are thinking about, and there really isn't a lot of time allotted to the show where you get to see them in a calm setting.
Yet, these all lead to you actually being interested in the characters in the first place, and it eventually leads up to the second season, where things get a lot more calm, and after getting to know much about various characters' dramas and problems, you finally get to witness more day to day activities of the characters you got to know in the first season.
Even then, you barely get to see characters' lives outside of school. Even when characters are close in the show, you rarely see them together outside of school-related work, so when you do see them meeting up in their private time, it definitely marks an important scene. Again, something atypical from other slice of life shoujo shows, where you get to see characters getting together outside of school extremely often, and probably more than you would ever see them inside of the school.
I praise the first two seasons, but the third season basically takes everything good from the first two seasons and guts it. There is a marked jump from old school animation to more modern anime style animation from the second to third season, but to say that the animation is phenomenal would be false. You're going to love slideshow decks, because a lot of scenes that would require a lot of animation tends to be abstracted to slideshows, which is a shame, but that's not the reason why the third season sucked. The first two seasons did not have stellar animation either, but the content of them were great. The third season felt like an entire filler one. Sure, you have characters doing all sorts of different activities, but none of the episodes really expanded on any relationships above a surface level, and it felt like more of "nothing" happening. School festivals, summer vacation activities, and even a trip to Paris. These seem like fun, normal slice of life activities, but characters do not engage in anything fun, and dialogue extremely stale. You don't even get to really know the characters any better, and none of the episodes are a prologue to something bigger later on. I doubt the author actually knew how write girls doing activities outside of the school, because it really felt like these characters were going through the motions. No drama, no character development, but a whole lot of boring time wasted on mundane slice of life.
The last season maintains a slow paced, but overall good couple of story arcs, with each character actually feeling alive again, doing what the story is best for. The quality jumps back up, and the anime feels alive again.
Lastly, Maria-sama ga Miteru is also definitely Yuri themed, and it's one that doesn't press on your face that it's girl on girl action, and I don't seem to think of the girls used as fan-service, the way that most yuri shows tend to turn out. The characters are realistic, and so when you see love forming two different characters, it actually feels genuine and not out of the blue. I've never been a huge fan of shoujo/drama, and especially not with Yuri either. Yet, this show deserves credit when credit is due: it's good.
