YMMV / Troy: Fall of a City

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Helen a tragic heroine, forced into a loveless marriage, or a ruthless sociopath who cares nothing for the people she gets killed? Despite her protestations, she keeps manipulating the people around her to get her way, crying crocodile tears whenever people die.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Needless to say the series is not popular with the Greeks. Not for the casting, at least not for the majority, as "diversity" and all its concepts is viewed like an American quirk, but for the way the Greeks are portrayed as villains with many saying that the producers butchered their national epic.
• Follow the Leader: Reviews and reception inevitably pegged it as a Game of Thrones wannabe.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Back in 2004, Sean Bean would play the role of Odysseus in Troy. Fast-forward and Joseph Mawle, who played Ned Stark's brother Benjen, is playing Odysseus.
• Moral Event Horizon: A rare case of weaponizing this for psychological warfare purposes, when Agamemnon is obliged to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable seas. Odysseus points out to him that when the Trojans hear what he was willing to do to ensure a Greek victory, they'll know to take them seriously.
• Narm:
  • In the opening scene, Cassandra gets her first vision, of her home city falling to shambles...but the striking imagery is immediately ruined by her actor's sudden, over the top scream.
  • In the first episode, when Paris chooses Aphrodite as the most beautiful out of three goddesses, the other two react by letting out a shrill screech. Nowhere is this mentioned in the original myth, and it looks absolutely ridiculous.
• Older Than They Think: This was hardly the first time black actors have played figures from Hellenic myth. The Xena: Warrior Princess episode Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts featured a black Helen, and in Jason and the Argonauts, Orpheus was played by Adrian Lester (a possible Shout-Out to the Oscars and Cannes award-winning film Black Orpheus).
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Casting black actors for Achilles, the gods and some other mortals, but particularly Achilles as the myth and show's poster boy, spawned a lot of online arguments regarding "blackwashing" and "forced diversity" on historical shows. It's the main thing the show got noticed for.
• So Okay, It's Average: Aside from the Black Achilles drama, the real criticism the show got was for focusing on relationships, interpersonal and politicking drama between various characters instead of the battles, which are both smaller-scale and less excitingly staged than Brad Pitt's Troy for instance, resulting in this feeling (at best) for viewers and reviewers who were just tuning in for the battles.
• Tear Jerker: It's the most legendary conflict in all of Western literature, so there's bound to be some tears:
  • Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia is extremely painful. First he lures his wife and daughter to the site under false pretenses, an arranged marriage with Achilles. When he takes Iphigenia up to the altar, it starts to dawn on her exactly what's about to happen, and she panics. After the deed is done, Clytemnestra wails helplessly at the bottom of the cairn, and Agamemon can only stand there screaming, "WHY?!"
  • When Menelaus meets Helen again during the first parley, he is not angry. First he asks her if Paris planned what he did beforehand, then if he forced her to go. When she tells him she went of her own free will, he quietly asks her what he did to her to deserve this. She simply tells him, "Nothing." He wasn't a bad husband; she just didn't love him.