I like the show overall but I do wish the showrunners had chosen to do, say, two or three seasons for the 1600s–early 1700s period, followed by a single huge time jump and then two or three seasons for the end of the age. (Annatar's arrival could be condensed into the 1600s or dealt with flashback, or even just skipped—start with him as a supposedly known quantity in Eregion.)
But I don't want that just because it's canon. It just seems like a missed opportunity to do something interesting and unusual with narrative structure. The showrunners have mentioned The Wire as an inspiration on their approach to storytelling structure, especially in the way they think of each season as a unit—which puts the lie to the notion that they think you can only do challenging narrative things in literature and not in TV. Sticking to Tolkien's timeline would have been a The Wire move: bold, tricky to pull off, and potentially very rewarding both thematically (unforeseen consequences of present choices loooong down the line, contrast between elven lives and the lives of mortals, etc.) and narrratively (the later Numenoreans' obsession with immortality could hit viewers pretty hard if they themselves had just "lost" everyone in the cast except elves and Sauron, for example).
I understand why they chose to compress and rearrange the timeline, why they thought it's the only right move. And it's not a bad move. But doing so yields a presumably much more conventional story structure. I would wager money that the coming seasons will be arranged around the lines of the poem, and this is why the show chose to have the canonically last-forged elven rings come first: S2: dwarven rings; S3: rings of men; S4: One Ring; S5: "In the Darkness Bind Them"/Last Alliance. That's a fine structure, I suppose. Just not an interesting one.
