Jeez, it took me more than a year to finish that 252-episode-and-a-movie monster of a series. But you know what? I enjoyed it. All 86 hours of it. That, alone, is a pretty impressive thing. Let me try to explain what it is about this series that makes it good despite its length.
Gintama, unlike most other long-running shows, occurs in short arcs, 1-5 episodes long, with the very longest being about 8 episodes. The vast majority of them fall between silly and absurd, with the longer arcs being much more likely to resemble the standard shonen fare of fights for honor, swordsmanship, badassery and saving the world, but usually with humorous interludes (such as a long-winded duel of out-witting each other about in a public restroom with no toilet paper), and, most importantly, endings. The short-arc format is one of the things that keeps Gintama fresh, especially combined with the show's intent of changing genre every arc (much like Excel Saga, a series which it definitely took several tips from).
Unlike most long-running shows, where the filler stabs you in the eye with its low quality and out-of-placeness, Gintama has no filler because it's all filler, but the filler is usually just as good as the actual show, or only a little bit worse. Gintama is also extremely off-color, making fun of the anime industry, other shonen shows, and generally breaking rules about what it should and shouldn't show. Kagura (the girl with the red hair and red chinese-style shirt in the picture above) is renowned for being the first heroine in a Shonen Jump series to vomit on-screen for instance, and she's hardly the only character to do supremely inappropriate things.
Gintama is a silly show with a lot of meta-humor, childish humor, toilet humor and absurdity punctuated with drama, heroism and good advice. If you can enjoy these things, you'll still probably dislike about one in five episodes of Gintama, but fortunately, there's so many episodes and they're so episodic that skipping a couple won't ruin anything for you.
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