Is that the one I'm thinking of, where Merlin is a young dude who works as Prince/King Arthur's squire/servant?
If so, I liked it too until I missed some episodes and stopped watching. It was kinda... I dunno, cheesy, and it took a lot of liberties with the legend it's based on, but it was oddly charming in its own way.
...Now I kind of want to know what happens after where I stopped watching.
Lancelot was a French invention, and pretty much all retellings of the Arthurian myths ignore things like that shining armor wasn't even a thing yet--even Mallory has anachronisms. Personally, I feel like you can do just about anything with the King Arthur myths >_> They're something of an internally contradictory, messy playground mashed up of various mythologies (what happened to the pagan magic of the early stories, the dragons and all that, that ceded to the Christian grail quest? King Pellinore's weird-ass quest beast? etc.). So, in this case, I feel that because the general
role of the characters is about the same or expanded, it's fun--and besides, the early part of the series is really just setting up the grounds for the actual action of the myths, anyhow. I'm not really fond of straight adaptations in general, besides.
Anyway, that said, >_< I agree that the early episodes were pretty predictable and cheesy--frankly bad, and utterly formulaic--but by episode 7 I was hooked. Every episode develops characters, provides foreshadowing for the main body of the tale, and gives a surprising amount of development of background. Back when I thought it was all a monster-of-the-week type deal I didn't like it very much, but now that I can see what's going on, it's great!