Swimming anime
If the above is an important part of your television experience, then you should probably watch Free!. Yes, I'm being redundant because of course the only thing people know about this anime is naked man fanservice, but let me stress that whatever it is you're expecting, it probably IS that bad. It has a target group and it proudly announces its intentions of appealing to its most basal interest. It is a story whose central theme is the naked torsos of teenage athletes, rendered in close-ups and with lovingly detailed muscle. There's also some pretty standard stuff about friendship and rivalry and team spirit and Japanese school clubs, but that didn't play any significant part of the plot until some point after episode six.
Summary time! Four boys with girly names were in a swim club together in grade school. Then one of them moved away to pursue a bigger dream, and the rest of them just quit and stuff. But now they're in high school, the old teammate is back and participating in the swimming club on a rival school, and has become kind of a jerk while he was away. This is clearly an unacceptable state of affairs so guys, it's time to find a new guy with a girly name and get the band back together!
Free! is really predictable and kind of boring until the last four or five episodes of it. If it had been twenty-four episodes instead of twelve, I honestly don't know if I'd have watched all of it. The first part of it has been done a lot before and felt like some weird mashup of Beyblade and Haruhi Suzumiya, except they're all swimmers and the character types utilized were a bit different. Unfortunately, the novelty of unusual character types only lasts for so long, and this story takes its sweet time to get to the point where it really shows us what's truly going on in the heads of these boys. It trudges along a well-worn path until somewhere around episode eight, and only then does it demand that I pay it more than half a glance of attention.
But those last five episodes really are fun, and the friendship-rivalry-teammate storyline resolves in a manner that I honestly didn't see coming. In the end, I was happy that I watched Free!, even if it is silly and there are other shows around that do the same story better. If nothing else, the abriged series is actually pretty funny.
Fanservice-y focus and cliché storytelling aside, I should probably warn you that there are some weird direction choices around that made some scenes that were meant to be super intense instead come across as unintentional parody. Too much closeup! Too much exaggarated camera angles! Too much goofy techno! And I'm pretty sure that the ED is trying to tell me that it's really about a man's desperate quest for a gay pool party.