Gintama spends its first dozen episodes feeling like a show that doesn't know what it wants to be, then it stops pretending and commits the cardinal sin: it makes you care about a deadbeat samurai and his broke ragtag crew while you're not looking. The comedy writes itself into corners so tight that the only way out is pure invention, and somehow it keeps finding new shapes. A show this willing to stop mid-arc for a completely unrelated gag, then pivot to genuine heartbreak about a character's past, shouldn't work, but it does because the characters are real enough that you follow them anywhere, even into jokes about jump manga tropes or a two-episode bit about pachinko.

Gintoki Sakata is a samurai living in an Edo where samurai are no longer needed. Aliens called the Amanto have forced feudal Japan to surrender, the shogunate now serves as their puppet, and swords are banned in public. Gintoki still carries a wooden sword and runs Yorozuya, a small business that takes odd jobs, often solving problems in strange and unexpected ways. He is helped by Shinpachi Shimura, a bespectacled boy who is supposedly learning the way of the samurai, and by Kagura, a tomboyish girl with superhuman strength and a bottomless appetite. Their giant dog Sadaharu likes to chew on people's heads. The work rarely pays enough for the trouble, but the crew needs it to make rent. Their jobs pit them against everything from alien royalty to local gangs in a city that keeps changing around them. Gintama is a long-running mix of action, comedy, drama and science fiction.