A lot. People here keep mentioning "Q Who?" as important. It very much is, to the entire franchise, not just TNG. And in the end, when Picard is musing aloud over what happened, it'll be your first opportunity to consider that Q might have done them a favor in his way and is more complex than you thought.
I'd say no, but muscle through it even if it's not clicking.
Frankly, there are great episodes in the first two seasons, it just hadn't fully hit a groove where you can just watch it and at least expect it to be ok to good (or hilarious) every time. The hatred for the first seasons is overhyped.
But yeah, a lot of the creaky joints, be it Picard being weirdly hostile and disengaged from the action, Q being weird and grating and Wesley being mishandled do go away eventually.
The first couple seasons were still under Gene Roddenberry's control. He maintained that there should not be any conflict between the crew members. That made the first couple seasons a little strange.
He had his eccentricities. It's hard to make a compelling show about human stories when the main cast aren't allowed to have interpersonal conflicts. But his vision of the utopian future would be that society wouldn't have in-fighting anymore.
Just skip the Riker Clip Show at the end of season 2, and you'll be fine. Apparently that episode was created because writers were on strike at the time
When I first started TNG I just looked up a list of the best episodes from season 1 and 2 and watched those then went straight to season 3. After I finished the show and loved it, I went back and rewatched seasons 1 and 2 fully. So that's a good option if you just wanna get to the good stuff quicker, and each episode is (for the most part) it's own self contained episode so you don't miss much by skipping parts of seasons 1 and 2 IMO as long as you watch the good episodes.
I'm on break at work so I don't have time to find the list I used but sure you can find something easily with a Google search or someone else here might recommend the best episodes of those seasons.