It's very pretty; the set and cgi folks deserve cudos and awards. The writing is...not so good. It varies from occasionally cringeworthy to mostly bland, but never inspiring. The characters are mostly unmemorable (imo the main Dwarven characters are the only ones I look forward to). They even managed to make orcs just meh. The story hasn't gelled to any extent for me, maybe that's for the next season. Indeed the whole thing seemed to be "let's carpet bomb the audience with new characters and disparate events for 8 episodes...and we'll figure out what to do with it next season". Or maybe it's because the Silmarillion is really not material that will ever translate well to film. And we know how all the bog story archs turn out in the end, so there's not even much anticipation for the next bit of it.