Back when I was a kid, I saw the 2004 version that had Jim Carrey back in theaters and I loved it while reading some of the books in a series it was adapting. What was unfortunate is that it didn't get a sequel due to the mishandled marketing campaign and it's competition with other movies at the time. A decade later, when I heard that Netflix was doing a series adapting all of the 13 books, I became interested and decided to check it out with anticipation.
Back at early 2017, I watched the entirety of the 1st season and from what I got so far it was a very good start. Now, the first episode isn't perfect, but it's far from bad (considering the rest of the season got better).
I'll start with the problems. The child acting is nothing terrible or anything, but not that great either. Malina Weissman did very good as Violet although I did prefer Sunny in the 2004 version and Louis Hynes did OK as Klaus. However, K. Todd Freeman's role as Mr. Poe didn't do anything for me only because of the way the character was written. There were also times where it can get a little too wordy and the pacing did felt uneven.
That being said, there are some good elements from this episode. The cinematography is well crafted, the directing is superb, the music score is very good fitting the atmosphere very well, and the rest of the acting is fairly good. Patrick Warburton (known as Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove and Joe Swanson from Family Guy) does some good narration especially in the beginning of the episode and Neil Patrick Harris steals the show as the sinister Count Olaf.
Overall, The Bad Beginning Part One isn't a perfect episode and it's not without it's problems, but it's a fairly good start to the show.