Both 'Gurren Lagann' and 'Space Dandy'.

They're (pretty popular) Anime series, just in case there's someone out there wondering "what the hell is that?"

I would say that I generally like Anime, but nothing with.... "fan service". That's the nice way of saying that Anime has a penchant for hyper-sexualized depictions of women, and I'm not someone who is going to recommend shows designed to be "fap material". I'm drawn to shows for the premise and the narrative more than big jiggly animated tits. I'll tolerate some ridiculous improbable breasts in a good show (because there's really no escaping them in this medium), but I find most of the shows with a "battle high school" or "nerdy guy surrounded by hundreds of impossibly hot co-eds" to be tedious, boring and frankly a bit embarassing. I'm not about to send you guys off to watch "Trapped on the Island of Bikini Babes 9".

With all of that said:

• Gurren Lagann was pitched to me as "the hypest show ever". The guy who introduced me to it said "it starts out crazy, then it one-ups that level of crazy, and then it just keeps one-upping itself in every single episode until the end". He was absolutely spot-on. I almost don't even know how to describe the basic premise without spoiling some of the fun. I guess it's no secret that this is a 'mecha' show. There are giant fighting robots in it. However, this is a show that starts from humble beginnings and eventually grows into the largest-scale ridiculous action scenes you have ever seen. Bigger than 'End of Evangelion', bigger than the final episodes of 'Kill La Kill', the only thing I know of that tops the TV series' ending is the alternate ending of this very same show in movie form.

One note about Gurren Lagann: you absolutely must watch this show in Japanese with subtitles. It's not because I'm some Anime Hipster telling you that Japanese is always better than English, it's entirely because of the character 'Kamina'. The Japanese voice actor for Kamina defines the character. It's not what Kamina says, but the voice with which he says it that makes his every moment onscreen an absolute joy. There's also this crazy signature war-cry that the Japanese voice actor does before all of Kamina's ridiculous speeches that the English voice actor doesn't attempt to re-create. The result is two very different characters that share the same face. One of them attempts to shout down a giant robot using only the power of a silly war cry and unshakable confidence; the other stands in the exact same spot and says "Hey! You big dumb robot! Get outta here! Nobody smashes up my village!". It's not exactly hard to decide between the two versions. The English dub is a good dub as far as Anime goes, but nobody captures the insane enthusiasm of the character like the original Japanese voice actor.

That's pretty much everything you need to know about Gurren Lagann going into it. It's on Netflix as of this writing, if you want to go watch it right now. I'm pretty certain you won't even need to give it the old "three episode test"; if you're not even a little bit interested by the end of the first episode, I'm pretty sure you're a robot.

• Space Dandy is going to get a much shorter write-up. This show has a very simple premise and virtually no inter-connecting plot. It's about "a dandy guy... in space". If you're at all familiar with Futurama and/or Cowboy Bebop, he's basically Zapp Brannigan from the former meets Spike from the latter. He's an alien hunter, and in this show that means that he hunts down undiscovered alien species and brings them to a "registration center" to be cataloged. For discovering these new species, he is paid some non-specific amount of money which he immediately blows at the nearest space-Hooters. His ultimate life goal is to save up enough money to open his very own space-Hooters, where he can eat and ogle women for the rest of his days. With his crew, a robot and some kind of cat-man, he travels the stars hilariously unaware of an evil empire's attempts to kill him. In every episode he and his crew bumble into some new situation, Dandy's arch-nemesis is somewhere nearby with some ultimately-doomed plan to kill him, and there's something like a 50/50 chance that everyone dies, gets eaten, or get trapped in another dimension. It's like the Anime equivalent of Adventure Time. I was immediately hooked on this one not because of any real story, but because every episode was such ridiculous fun that I just had to see what the next one had in store. Be warned that some of the episodes will make you feel feelings, much like Futurama.