Tonight's pick is One Piece, the anime adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's manga that has been airing continuously since 1999 and still has not told its last story. Monkey D. Luffy, a teenager whose body turned to rubber after an accidental run in with a Devil Fruit, sets out to find the treasure known as the One Piece and become the next King of the Pirates.
The premise sounds simple, and the show spends remarkably little time actually chasing it. What keeps people watching for more than a thousand episodes is the crew Luffy builds along the way, a group that keeps growing stranger and more specific the longer the series runs, and the way the show commits fully to both slapstick comedy and genuine stakes in the same episode.
One Piece holds a 9.0 average on IMDb, an unusually high number for a show with this much runtime behind it, and it is still one of the most consistently well reviewed long running anime on air.
It is streaming now on Netflix and Hulu, in whatever order you want to start it. Nobody agrees on the right entry point, and that might be part of the fun.
