Coming from someone's whose main exposure to the LotR universe is the original movies, The Hobbit book, and then the first hobbit movie, the show seems...fine. Not great, but not terrible. The first episode was interesting enough and visually impressive. The second episode, however, really started showing its cracks. The pacing of the different PoVs was at times poor, as was the writing (e.g., everything involving the rafts, the needless fight scene in the Healer's house, the 2 cliffhangers in a row at the end of the episode). Extrapolating forward, I worry that I'll spend a lot of time getting tired and/or frustrated with certain scenes/plotlines, which will drag me out of enjoying the show.
The fantasy races seem fine. Elves are arrogant, stoic, and easily stuck in their ways. Dwarves are also arrogant, but jovial too with a hint of cunning/ruthlessness. Hobbits are reclusive and full of life. Wizards are weird. Humans are...humans, prone to paranoia and violence. The show's solution to (earth)-race is practically the perfect one: just put people of color in roles and don't comment on it in-universe. The other options would be to: a.) create specific societies of single earth-races for each fantasy-race (e.g., the black human society, the white humans, the middle-eastern humans; and similar for all fantasy races) or b.) only cast a single-earth race for some/all fantasy-races (e.g., all elves are white; possibly everyone is white).
It'll be interesting to see how the audience & critic reviews change as time passes and the dominant opinions (hopefully) become more based on the actual show content, rather than how well it matches with Tolkien's lore and outrage about black elves. Female dwarves should have beards though; fight me.
