I believe Shinchiro Watanabe directed both Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.  One common theme in both of these series is the heavy incorporation of a particular type of music (Jazz in Cowboy Bebop and Hip Hop in Samurai Champloo), with the music contrasting with each anime's respective setting.

Samurai Champloo was fucking amazing

I think to a certain extent Outlaw and Blacksaber are right even though are opinions are valid nonetheless. It is that we haven't seen breadth of genres anime has to offer mainly deviating between only shonen, thriller and sport.

I think we need a general anime discussions thread to keep all this material in one place >.

1.FMA/FMA Brotherhood (need to watch original FMA to fully understand Brotherhood)
2. Monster (this series definitely does not get enough credit)
3. Code Geass
4. Death Note
5. Dragon Ball Z (the grandaddy of them all!)

That is why it is such a hidden gem Urasawa is one of my favorite mangka's and he has been continuing his trend of making diamonds with his latest work (his own rendition of the Astro Boy story) Pluto which I would heavily recommend to anyone who loved Monster.

Slam Dunk the king of all sports animes doesn't get enough credit even >.<

1.MONSTER 2.NARUTO(+Shippuden) 3.Shiki 4.Deathnote 5.Blue Exorcist

Agreed. Monster was the first anime where I bought the 1st box set full price even knowing that Viz was not planning on realeasing reast of the box sets. Hopefully Viz realeases the other box sets eventually. I would buy them day 1. Also to anyone who wants to watch Monster VIZ put up the fully dubbed and subbed version on Hulu.

Kinda surprised that noone in this thread has voted for Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away ( or even Akira)
Ok they are movies and not TV shows but I can't honestly compare any Miyazaki movie to a standard tv anime and say that miyazaki doesn't come out on top so my top 5 would be 5 Miyazaki movies........

The problem being that, today, people who are not already fans of anime would have to rely exclusively on Adult Swim to tell them what anime to watch (at least in American). I haven't watched SyFy in a while, so they might still have their AniMonday (which exposed me to both Gurren Lagann and Now and Then, Here and There, as well as one of the Street Fighter series), and both sources have it in their interest to either bring suspense or shonen action series primarily, so we miss comedy, school-drama, slice-of-life

Of course, Adult Swim constantly makes fun of the fact that their anime usually gets poor ratings. The only one that can really compete with Family Guy reruns is Bleach, which is beyond sad (not being able to compete with Family Guy new i could get, but not being able to compete with reruns?)

I was never a huge fan of anime, but lately I have had an urge to start getting into one. The main deterrent for me with anime is they are usually these very long series with deep stories that take awhile to get into, so I feel like I'd really have to invest a lot of time in a show just to know what's going on, so I want to make sure the show I start watching is worth the time.

A couple of my friends are big anime buffs and they tell me that some good ones are Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, X, and Ghost in the Shell, so I figure I'd start with those. Cowboy Bebop seems like a safe bet at least, as I've heard great things from several people about it and it seems to have been mentioned frequently in the topic. Can anyone attest to the other ones?