The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is based upon the light novel series. Season 1 had 14 episodes which originally aired in 2006. Then during a rebroadcast in 2009, 14 new episodes were mixed in (which were collectively known as season 2). The new episodes were slotted in based on where among the other episodes it chronologically fitted in. The only issue with this is that it is obvious from the animation quality what was season 1 and what was season 2.
The anime follows Kyon, a normal boy who is just beginning high school. It is in this class that he meets Suzumiya Haruhi. During her introduction to the class, we see how weird Haruhi is (and is quite infamous for from others who were in the same middle school). Haruhi outright states that she has not time for normal humans and to only approach her if you are a time-traveler, an alien or an esper. The thing is, while Haruhi gets bored at anything else, she is clever and athletic.
For some odd reason, Kyon is one of the only ones that manage to have normal conversations with Haruhi. While it starts off awkward, soon after, Haruhi starts to pull Kyon (who is completely unwilling and regret getting himself into this situation) into her crazy antics. The first of which was to create her own after school school, known as the SOS Brigade. The aim of the SOS Brigade is to investigate unusual anomalies. Since you need at least five people to form a club, they manage to find a few other characters, each one having their own weird quirks. First up is Nagato Yuki, who is solely focused on her reading. As the last surviving member of the Literature Club, she gets absorbed into the SOS Brigade. Then there is Asahina Mikuru, who is cute and follows all of Haruhi's crazy whims (such as always wearing a maid costume inside the club room). Lastly, there is Koizumi Itsuki who is a transfer student.
While the first few episodes start off as a normal slice-of-life anime, it soon takes a turn to the bizarre. To Kyon's surprise (and later, his expectations), he finds out that the people around him are not what they seem. It's actually really interesting at how all these separate coincidences centers around Haruhi, you end up eager to find out why this is the case. The anime ends up taking on a sci-fi theme.
As the anime goes on, the important of Haruhi is more and more obvious. Disasters happen when she gets bored or if she has sudden mood swings. This leads to Kyon to avert this disasters, usually with guidance from the other members. For some reason, Kyon's presence is really intertwined with Haruhi's. Unfortunately, Haruhi gets more and more unreasonable as the season goes on and there is absolutely no concrete reason why anyone has to go with her ways. Yes, she is super important to the world but on the other hand, she ends up being quite annoying without a proper reason on why she is so important.
All the episodes feel like that there wasn't enough content for the episode but they had to drag it out anyway. Since each mini-arc takes multiple episodes, the problem is compounded. While a few episodes can be boring, especially with a lot of spoken dialogue with limited things happening on screen, there are scenes where it's really funny too. It's hard to tell the direction the anime is going in since the plots for a lot of the episodes is just things happening due to Haruhi's intentions and thoughts.
Haruhi gets bored easily and when she gets bored, she thinks up of random things to do. She then forces the entire group to do it and due to the nature of things, they all agree. Kyon is reluctant most of the time since he is the one that bears the full force of Haruhi. They end up doing things such as making a movie, play baseball and play games. Season 2 is the one where it opted to include the infamous Endless Eight episodes. The background of this is that we have eight episodes of exactly the same events, to simulate the characters experiencing the time loop. Each episode differs from each other, with scenes shown from slightly different camera angles, and slightly differing dialogue. Unfortunately, while the concept may sound cool (not really), after three or four episodes, you would have had enough, let alone eight of the same thing.
It's no wonder that the second season got so much flak. More than half of the new episodes are the same event repeated again. It is hard to decipher why anyone would think that this was a good decision because due to the different camera angels, the animation work would have been the same as if they had done a different arc. In the end, it gets excessively repetitive, boring and because you know the arc won't be resolved until the eighth episode, you know that there is little point in watching yet another loop.
Overall, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya falls victim to the Seinfield Syndrome, where it was the first to do a lot of things but everything else copies it to the point of being tired cliches now. There are some odd choices of the anime, especially wasting eight episodes on repeating the same events. There are a lot of scenes where literally nothing happens and plenty of leaps of logic. While there are interesting concepts and humor, the pacing just does not work that well.
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