I have to say, that'd be hard if it weren't for the start of Shippuden, which is honestly, horrible. I know it may seem unfair to make my choice based on how the show started but seriously, it's really bad. I mean, how many episodes did it take for Gaara to show up, lose a fight, get killed, get revived, and go home, because that's basically all that happens that matters in that arc. Making a powerful puppet master, only to kill him before arc's end, doesn't make it important to the story. The answer to that question I asked by the way, is 32. That's 8 months of weekly episodes to get one plot point and some basic information through that could have been handled in less than 16. By episode 32 of Naruto, they are already in the Chunin exams, Sakura is trying to defend Naruto and Sasuke from sound Ninja, and just in general, a lot more happened. It wouldn't bother me as much that it took that long for that arc, but that arc set the pace for the entire show, which was, incredibly sluggish to say the least, and it probably was so because they got away with dragging on one short arc for 3/4's of a year. The pacing of Shippuden was just, really, really bad, and while one could argue that Naruto had too many fillers, I don't mind it. Without those fillers, the characters from Naruto wouldn't have had the impact they do because I wouldn't have known them as well. Sure, they all pretty much told the same story, but they did with it different characters so you got to know them all, so that when characters like Neji die, it means more than it would have otherwise. Naruto has a portion that is a low note, Shippuden has huge chucks of low notes to try and make the high notes seem like they have more impact and if I hadn't been watching anime for over 15 years by the time that really set in, I might have been okay with it, but I did and, I'm not. Shippuden is okay, but there's no way it has even the slightest chance of being better than Naruto was.