I'm on episode 3 or 4 of Rings of Power. It's boring. Is it work slogging through to get to something better later in the season? I'm close to abandoning it. I don't like shows that waste my time.
I found the first couple of episodes of Rings of Power to be very disappointing and I was quite worried about how the series would turn out. But it did improve a lot as it went along. I was a huge Tolkien nerd when I was younger, which can be a double edged sword. On the one hand you're emotionally invested in the material and might be inclined to try to like it even if it's not very good. On the other, you might have different expectations from what most viewers might-- if the creators handle the material in a way that doesn't line up with how you see the source material, you might be overly critical.
Generally I felt like the show worked pretty well when the Galadriel story or the Elrond story were on the screen, but ground to a halt when the happy little hobbits were on the screen. I enjoyed the second half of the series once they got things rolling a little.
There was some amount of internet complaining about the multi-racial cast, but honestly I stopped even noticing after a while. At first I was like "this hobbit girl is as pale as the driven snow but her mom is African. How does that work? Is she adopted or something?" and the improbability of an inbred traveling tribe where everybody has different accents and ethnicity was a bit jarring at first. But after a while I was like "all these goddamned hobbits are just so annoying" and didn't even notice what their skin tone was. At some point it becomes easy to just forget that stuff.
-k