David Gyasi is everywhere these days, holding his own on The Diplomat, and good for him, because the man can act. But before he was trading veiled threats in embassy hallways, he took on the role that got everybody screaming at each other: Achilles, in the BBC's 2018 series Troy: Fall of a City. MSN has the rundown, and it dragged the whole argument back into the light, where it belongs.

The show retold the Trojan War, and casting a Black actor as the golden boy of Greek myth stirred up a fuss that outlasted the series by years. Fine. Here's where I come down, and I'm not hedging. My complaint about that series was never the casting. Gyasi gave Achilles a real gravity, a wounded pride you could feel through the screen, and he was one of exactly three people on that set, possibly fewer, who seemed to understand what myth is for. My complaint is that the show was dull, and dullness is the one sin a Trojan War story cannot survive. The myth gives us rage, grief, gods behaving badly, and a war that lasted a decade. The BBC gave us a leaden pace and a screenplay that read like a committee translating legend through a focus group, which is more or less what it was.

My rule, held since the Rex Theater days: cast the best actor and tell the story straight. What I won't forgive is the modern habit of taking a three-thousand-year-old story and dressing it in this decade's lectures, as if Achilles needs a seminar stapled to his back. The character has survived all this time because he's a man who knows his fate and chooses glory anyway, and the engine needs nothing added. You don't improve on it. You get out of its way, or you go make something else.

The argument over that show never really ended, and I suspect it was the most interesting thing about it, which is the indictment. I've had the thought, and I can't prove it, that the people behind it were so busy patting themselves on the back over the casting noise that they forgot to make the show worth arguing about. Either way, we've all seen that movie before, usually with a $200 million budget and a lecture where the third act should be.

Gyasi came out of it fine. He always does. Watch him in The Diplomat sometime and notice how much he does with a pause, which is more than half this town can do with a monologue. If Hollywood had sense, they'd hand him a real leading role in something with actual stakes. Maybe a Western. Beau would tell you they're all the same movie, and Beau, as usual, would be wrong.