Well, the nice thing about Mushi-Shi is that there's very little continuity between episodes -- people can walk in and walk out and practically every episode is its own short story.

Oooh, just thought of another fun one like that, which is shorter: Seraphim Call! Every episode is a different girl, and her own short story.

(Though it occurs to me that marathoning the first story arc of Utena would be a nice introduction, and with the remastered set and all...)

I like the idea of a run of first episodes! There's a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to check out, but getting DVDs from Netflix has surprisingly annoying overhead when one is spoiled by streaming. :)