I increasingly see that question on other forums and it drives me up the wall. That question is a perfect storm of two things: ▪︎the mindless consumer fanboy-ism that has destroyed all major film franchises ("it contradicts the lore, is objectively miserable, and an active waste of my time, but it has Star Trek in the title, so I'll watch it.") ▪︎developmentally stunted inability to fill in any blanks whatsoever
I promise you, Pee Pee Poo Poo: The Musical: Season 1 has absolutely no key nutrient you have to absorb to comprehend season 2. In fact, if we're talking one of these shows that go through three showrunners a season, it might be more comprehensible if you skip the earlier stuff.
I have more respect (deep respect) for those making a watch list of what's required for One Piece, Gundam and the Fate franchise than any of this artificial 'required watching' by rabid consumers.
The former is trying to help newcomers get into decade long franchises, the latter is by desperate people trying to insist they are still relevant.
I mean it's still basically just watching in release order for those franchises. (Unless you want to watch Fate's anime series only and not read the original VN for some reason (a mistake), in which case you probably wanna start with Fate/Zero)
Is there a path to get caught up on the story and plot quickly to watch current stuff or do you need to watch in release order?
As I know One Piece and Bleach fans made a guide of which episodes are required so people can skip fillers and catch up.
There's not many filler episodes/arcs in One Piece, it's just kinda slow-paced. You can just google a filler guide for when it comes up though.
If you want to get "quickly caught up", just read the manga as it's way faster. But it's all one story, you aren't really supposed to "skip" anything, release order is the way the story is structured.
In Bleach that's fair, there's a lot of filler episodes, they make entire filler arcs and you can just google a filler guide for that too, but other than skipping the filler arcs/episodes, release order is intended. (Although Bleach is weird, because the first filler arc they have is gigantic, and it's so huge they actually reference it in the anime canon material afterwards presumably just to make the viewer not feel like his time was wasted lol). Though on that note, besides the Bount arc, Bleach filler arcs are actually good somehow imo. Other anime filler is often terrible but I've always enjoyed Bleach's.