So the first episode of Picard is out. It's a mixed bag but I'm hopeful. I don't really think any of this would be considered a spoiler as it's prologue and you find out about most of it in the first five minutes... but fair warning.
Ok let's get the bad stuff out of the way. The plague that is Kurtzman is at it again, busting up canon left and right. See when Starfleet figured out that Romulus was going to explode (See the crappy JJ Abrams movie) now Admiral Picard headed an effort to save all the Romulans via building a massive fleet of ships on Mars and then going to rescue them. Sometime during this process, the synthetics (aka androids) working on Mars mysteriously attacked, killing 100k people and scrapping the mission, which caused Picard to resign as the federation refused to try and help the Romulans after that. Ok full stop. Remember how on numerous occasions on tng and later movies, including the last damn movie where Data says that he, along with his brothers, are the only androids in Starfleet and the only life forms of their kind known? Yeah so where do all the other robots come from? Hopefully this is the only huge thing they ---fudgesicle--- up. I mean it's made clear in Voyager, DS9 and subsequent series that the future of artificial life is in hologram programs... why limit your AI to one physical form that can easily be destroyed?
Anyway, that caused Starfleet to put a ban on the creation of more androids, which of course haunts Picard as that truly kills Data since he'll never have kin ("Before" is dead and in a shelf btw) but surprise, surprise, that mysterious girl from the previews that is clearly Data's daughter turns out to be.... gasp.... Data's daughter. The plot is convoluted as hell but it gets us to the good part, which is Picard is now headed towards a mission involving complex moral questions with the potential fate of a being or maybe race of beings hanging in the balance. You know, Star Trek TNG at it's best. The visuals are a mixed bag. The show looks warm and inviting compared to the grim-dark fest that is Discovery. The only issue is virtually any space scene or scene that would have involved those beautiful matte paintings back in the day is cgi… and for the most part the cgi is bad. They have an interior shot of 10 forward and it looks worse than a video game from the 90s. They need to throw this show some of Discovery's budget.
So to summarize, brilliant acting, inviting visuals, good emotional core, which I suppose is the important stuff, but bad everything else.