Spoilers Guillermo del Toro's Trollhunters on Netflix

So I checked out this little gem of an animated show because I saw the advertisement and liked the artwork.
I expected something on the level of the How to train your dragon show, but Trollhunters is much better imo.

already in it's first season it establishes a lot of creative lore, interesting multilayered characters and interesting storys.
The villains are not always the mustache twirling one dimensional foes you expect (except the goblins, who literally want to be mustache twirling baddies. They use a black marker pen and draw a twirled mustach on their faces to claim leadership whenever one of them meets their demise, which happens a lot!)

At times the show's themes get quite a bit darker than you would expect from a kid's show.
It doesn't shy away from death and loss of friends and not every main character makes it through the first season.

A bit bittersweet is the knowledge of Anton Yelchin doing the voice of the lead character Jim.
He is doing a really good job and they have to recast him for the next season.
The other voice actors are also pretty good.
Kelsey Grammar, Ron Perlman and Tom Hiddleston among them.

I can highly recommend the show and can't wait for the next season, even without Anton.

I've been watching it sporadically. It is better than I expected.

I just finished this. It took a while to really grab me, but it got pretty engrossing toward the end. It's well-executed, but I could wish it didn't have so many familiar cliches in its premise. You've got the chosen-one hero -- a white male as usual -- his chubby, unpopular comic-relief sidekick, the female lead who's better than the chosen one at almost everything but is largely defined as the romantic interest, the world of fantasy creatures who are overwhelmingly male, the cliched high-school characters like the bully, the nerd, the popular girls, the loud gym teacher, the overdramatic drama teacher, etc. On paper, it's very conventional, even kind of backwards. But there's some excellent nuance and character development and drama and humor in the execution. Although modern children's programming has far too much grossout and scatological humor for my tastes.

The animation is also very good, though I'll never be as fond of 3D computer animation as I am of traditional animation. And the voice work is good, especially Kelsey Grammer as Blinky. I'm also unexpectedly impressed by Fred Tatasciore as Aaarrrgghh. I've been lukewarm about his work as the Hulk and other characters in the past, but he brought a surprising amount of nuanced delivery to Aaarrrgghh's minimalist dialogue. As for Anton Yelchin, he was always a terrific actor, and it's a shame they have to recast him. Although there was a throwaway line from Blinky about expecting Jim's voice to change eventually, which would help to justify the recasting -- or at least it would if the season hadn't ended on a cliffhanger.

Oh, and there is one cliche it's avoided, at least so far -- I kept expecting that Jim's absentee father would turn out to have disappeared as part of the larger Trollhunter backstory and turn out to be key to the big arc or something. That hasn't happened so far, although it might still come in the next season. We still don't know why Jim was chosen as the Trollhunter, after all.

Although it's interesting that they released 26 episodes as a single season, when it's clearly structured as two 13-episode seasons, the way Dreamworks releases its Dragons: Race to the Edge episodes on Netflix. I wonder why they released them both at once for this show.