Some of it I don't mind; the compression of the timeline is clearly because they want to extract all the good bits and highlights for the show. So if they want the Drowning of Numenor, which should be spectacular if they can pull it off properly, then it has to be set in the time of Miriel and Ar-Pharazon.

I don't even mind mixed-race Miriel because it's Numenor, we can explain that by 'we don't know what her mother's side of the family was like, they could be descendants of the loyal Easterlings'. That's plausible in a way that the black Elf and Dwarf are not.

The stupid shit is things like Galadriel and Halbrand romance, which turns out to be Galadriel and Sauron romance. The mangling of Celebrimbor's character - I have no idea if the actor is any good, because he's had about ten lines in the entire season and all he does is stand around in the background not knowing basic metallurgy.

Now it looks like they're going for "The Three Rings were evil all along [they weren't], Elrond was against using them [he wasn't] and he's calling for their destruction [again, no; the Elves became aware of Sauron when he put on the One Ring and they took off and hid the three rings]". That's not the canonical story, but of course our genius showrunners need to make the story exciting by building tension, and you do that by division and conflict, so it's going to be Elrond versus Galadriel (and maybe Gil-galad).

And of course they have to drag Tom Bombadil into it to encourage I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf to get involved in the plight of Middle-earth, even though in LOTR it's established that they don't entrust Tom with the One Ring because he doesn't concern himself with outside matters and would just forget it or lose it. That's how little he cares about "the wider picture".

This is going to be so dumb and stupid. I can hardly wait!

So basically they made Life of Brian after reading the Bible

Payne and McKay really do think they can write a better story than Tolkien,

Thanks I don't know who these two are, but that's all I needed to know to give the show 1 star on IMDB, Google and RT.

so maybe it's pretty close to the books.

Not even remotely close to the plot.

The problem is that "The Silmarillion" is not a novel, many people get disappointed with it after reading LOTR because they expect something similar. It's a mythology book, kind of like a fake Bible or like the Finnish Kalevala and the Icelandic Sagas.

!bookworms that's why you should always do some research before picking up a book for reading, like knowing what it is.

No, not really. "The Silmarillion" was a fix-up by Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay of the papers JRR Tolkien left behind, since he had always wanted to publish it but couldn't make it happen. He was working on it and reworking it for decades so there were variant versions, and Christopher picked the ones they thought could be linked together most consistently.

But when the showrunners try to write "epic" language and dialogue, they fall flat, because they're not steeped in the language and mindset of the ancient sagas as JRRT was, so they give us silly lines like "boats float and stone sink because boats look up and stones look down" or "drop the quail sauce, give me the meat and give it to me raw" (and that's because they're basing their Dwarves off the comedic version of the Dwarves in the Jackson movies). The boring dialogue is all their own original work.