You're welcome, but about half the episodes are bad. The season openers are the worst. YMMV. I recommend "Look before you sleep", "Green isn't your color", "Sisterhooves Social", "Hearts and Hooves Day", "Read it and Weep", "MMMystery on the Friendship Express", or "Sweet and Elite". Avoid "Feeling Pinkie Keen", "Over a Barrel", and "Canterlot Wedding".
I can't believe I just wrote that.
The show's writers are often sloppy about consistency--characters, history, apparent time period, etc., change wildly from episode to episode. There's a lot of fridge horror in things that the writers threw in without thinking through the implications. There are a number of episodes with stupid (as in, possibly harmful) "morals".
What the show has is a certain attitude that's generally been lacking in entertainment (niceness, basically), and it's the only show I can think of at the moment where the characters are grown-ups. In pretty much every other show on TV, there are a bunch of characters who come together for one specific purpose or reason (to run a news show, fight vampires, get off the island, hunt aliens, run a hospital, talk with each other in a bar, whatever). Then they go back to whatever it is they do when they aren't together, which isn't important. In MLP, the characters all have their own lives, and there is no one thing they all get together for. The lives they are having offstage aren't irrelevant; they're often the ultimate causes of the conflicts that cause them to get together.
Maybe Lost was similar in that way. I didn't see enough of it to judge.
I still think people should realize their model is broken when a children's program contains ritual sacrifice to demons.
Thank you for the information. Getting information about exactly which episodes of a show are good is not so simple, and this gives me a good starting base.
My mother won't watch animated movies. It doesn't matter what the content is. Whether it's Sponge Bob or Grave of the Fireflies, she believes that animation is used only for shows for children, and that adults shouldn't watch shows for children. She's incapable of changing this belief, because even if I somehow convince her to sit and watch an animated film, she sees what she expects, not what's in front of her.
I think this is the same thing that creation scientists and climate-change deniers do. They literally cannot perceive what is in front of them, because they are already convinced they know what it is.
Here's an interesting test, which I discovered by accident: There's a hilarious series of fan-made parodies of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on YouTube called Friendship is Witchcraft. They took show videos and redubbed them to have different stories in which various ponies are robots, fascists, or cult members planning to awaken Cthulhu. I've shown these videos to four people without explanation, just saying "You've got to see this!" and bringing up "Cute From the Hip" on YouTube.
The same thing always happens. They watch with stony, I-must-be-polite-to-Phil faces, without laughing. Eventually I realize that they think they're watching an episode of My Little Pony. I explain that it's a parody, and they say, "Oh!" I'd think that lines like "I know we've taught you to laugh in the face of death," "If you think one of your friends is a robot, kids, report them to the authorities so that they can be destroyed!", "I'm covered in pig's blood!", or, "Are you busy Friday? We need a willing victim for our ritual sacrifice" would prompt some questions. They don't. They are so determined to see a TV show for little girls that that's what they see, regardless of what's in front of them.