I have watched all 12 episodes and was unmoved. I don't see why such a huge crowd calls it a masterpiece. it's not that memorable nor is it a classic. I could list all the reasons that it is not that great but that's my own opinion. I like magical girls but this show is no different from the previous ones like Sailor Moon, Precure, and many others. Those shows do include young girls fighting to save the world and facing their own problems. They are also "dark" in the sense that the monsters or villains they fight are able to execute them at any moment. If one really reads into Madoka, one will see the many similarities to other mahou shoujo anime. It is also not original in any way. It borrowed (well stole in my opinion) from preexisting works to make it seem symbolic and intelligent.
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Madoka: The TV Series
Before I begin to review The Movies, let me briefly describe how I feel about the TV series. You see, before I watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica, my undisputed favorite TV show was The Sopranos, a show about which I still can gush for hours. This kind of down-to-earth style fiction still dominates the majority of my favorites list. The narrative of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, however, is in many ways an antithesis to that of The Sopranos:
The one thing that those shows have in common is that many see both of them as Genre Deconstructions, but as someone who doesn't know more about the Magical Girl genre than what he learned from watching a few episodes of Sailor Moon when his sister was watching them, I can't really tell.
I could go on about the contrast between the two series, but my point is that Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the one show that reminded me how to appreciate fantastic, allegoric fiction outside of comedy. The show is an artistic, poetic, beautifully paced, thought-provoking tragedy.
To be honest, I was about to drop the show after watching the first two episodes because I let my preconceptions keep me from enjoying the beginning. A few weeks later, I was bored so I decided to watch the infamous third episode, after which I devoured all of the rest of the series in only one night. Today, I love this show enough to have it watched several times over and I would recommend it to a wide array of people, but especially those with interest in classics of German Literature. And from my personal experience, I can tell you that you don't need to know a great deal about the Magical Girl genre to fall in love with this epic masterpiece.