Star Trek: Enterprise may not have been the best received series in Star Trek history, but that's certainly not to say that you should just skip the series altogether.
I can remember when the series first was announced and Scott Bakula's name was attached to it, and I couldn't help but get excited since I was a big fan of Quantum Leap & liked his work. Immediately, I was interested, & when it was announced it was going to be a prequel series to Star Trek: The Original Series, I was intrigued.
The release of Star Trek: First Contact had given us a good reintroduction to Zephram Cochrane (played now by James Cromwell), the father of warp flight technology in Star Trek lore. Of course, this was also a character originally introduced on TOS, but by the mid-nineties, Cromwell was the best-known actor for the part. Now, Star Trek just needed to bridge the gap between Zephram Cochrane and James T. Kirk. Enter, Captain Jonathan Archer and the crew of the Enterprise NX-01.
The crew of the Enterprise NX-01 was what you'd expect: very green and not expecting what they'd ultimately find out in the new wilderness of space previously unexplored by mankind. And because of the lack of experience in exploring the cosmos, we see the writers start to lay the groundwork for what we all know to be "the Starfleet way". The following are a handful of episodes that I find to be great episodes of that "laying the groundwork" so to speak.