Bleach follows Ichigo Kurosaki, a teenager who has always been able to see ghosts. When he meets Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper battling monstrous spirits called Hollows, an emergency forces her to hand him her powers, and he inherits her job of protecting the living and guiding the dead.
The anime was produced by Studio Pierrot and directed by Noriyuki Abe. It began airing on TV Tokyo in October 2004 and stayed on the air every week for seven and a half years, ending in March 2012 after 366 episodes.
That length is part of the story. Nearly half of those episodes, 163 of them, including the Bount arc and the Zanpakuto Unknown Tales arc, were never written by creator Tite Kubo. Pierrot built them from scratch to keep a weekly series running while Kubo kept working on the manga, rather than pausing the broadcast to wait for him. Viewers who followed the original run lived through long detours before the story picked back up where it had left off, and it shaped how Bleach is remembered.
None of that has hurt its staying power. Masakazu Morita and Fumiko Orikasa have voiced Ichigo and Rukia since episode one, and the series holds an 8.2 on IMDb, a strong number for a show that spent so much of its run away from its own source material. Skip lists exist for a reason, but the filler arcs are also where the show's oddball humor got the most room.
Bleach is streaming now on Hulu in the US, and on Disney Plus for viewers in the UK and Australia. Its continuation, Thousand-Year Blood War, is airing the last ten episodes of its final season weekly on Hulu right now, which makes tonight a good time to start from the beginning and see where it all came from.
