So I'm halfway through the first 3 episodes so far this season.
Slogging through it, as they say. Now I'm taking a breather.
I'm starting to think this is what it would be like to watch a novelization of a movie put to screen. That is, someone took a complete, unedited and uncut original script for a movie, wrote out a novel from it (sticking in lots of fiddly bits to pad things out to novel length), and now someone took that novel and turned it into a television series. Paragraph by paragraph. By paragraph. Except for the Rings of Power, there is no film, or script, or novelization, or anything it's based on beyond appendices from the books, and various writings and notes from Tolkien, and some hypothesizing from the production team, right?
I've been looking at the numbers. The LOTR movie trilogy totals about 10.5 hours. Based on 3, not very short books (or 6, depending on publisher, etc.), a lot of the books were not included in the films, story timelines and important elements were compressed or abbreviated, and so on. Meanwhile, Amazon claims the full 5 seasons of the Rings of Power will fill about 50 hours, roughly.
Nothing specific to say about these observations. But as I said, I'm slogging through it.