Panty and Stocking is the fevered brainchild of a group of drunken animators who really wanted to make sick jokes, sex jokes, riff on some standard anime tropes, including those they had popularized themselves, and incidentally pay homage to some of what they felt were the better shows their western counterparts had put out, such as The Powerpuff Girls, Invader Zim, and Drawn Together.
Yes, really. Panty and Stocking was dreamed up during an overnight vacation/party. If you've seen the show, this shouldn't really come as too much of a surprise. Luckily, Gainax had both the chops and the base-level insanity to pull off what they wanted to do in a rather glorious fashion.
The story they dreamed up revolved around two fallen angels fighting monsters of the week (called ghosts), to get heaven coins (called heavens), so that they can get back to their home in Heaven (called . . . Heaven.) Unfortunately, they're not really very dedicated to the cause, since both of them would still prefer to indulge in the vices that got them kicked out in the first place. There's some other plot that crops up later on, and a fairly epic example of trolling in the season finally, but for the most part it's just good dirty fun.
Obviously, this is not your traditional anime.
Help! We Are Listed opened in April 2011. The title is a take-off on the P&S music video/episode entitled Help! We Are Angels, which in its turn is a send-up to The Beatles. (Their movie Help! was subtitled "we are idols" for the Japanese release.)