‘The Crowded Room’ Quickly Empties Into a Convoluted Thriller With Ridiculous Payoffs

Alci Rengifo

The streaming revolution has been a gift and a curse for various forms of TV storytelling. Some narratives have benefitted from being spread out over multiple episodes. Others would have been just fine in a tighter movie. Apple TV’s “The Crowded Room” falls into the latter category. Created by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, the very premise of this series is its most fatal aspect. We are asked to endure 10 episodes of slow burner build-up, puzzles, yawn-inducing dramatic stakes and tear-jerker moments to then have one of this year’s most calculated twists render everything we just saw nearly meaningless.

It’s the golden age of IP, so Goldsman bases the show on “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” a nonfiction novel by Daniel Keyes. If you’ve read the book, then you already know where the series is headed. But for those not in the know, the story is set in 1979. A talented teen named Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) is a total outsider at school while living at home with a tender mom, Candy (Emmy Rossum) and abusive father Marlin (Will Chase). There was also a twin brother, Adam, whose death haunts Danny. After being rescued from local bullies by an enigmatic neighbor, an Israeli named Yitzak (Lior Raz), Danny moves in and meets Ariana (Sasha Lane), one of those hard-partying girls who is clearly damaged, thus pulling Danny into her orbit. Eventually the two will chase down a man who raped her to Rockefeller Plaza, where a subsequent arrest results in Danny telling his story to a professor of psychology, Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried).

Goldsman’s most famous feat as a screenwriter remains 2001’s “A Beautiful Mind,” the award-winning Ron Howard film about mathematician John Nash’s battle with schizophrenia. Goldsman won an Oscar for his screenplay and returns to familiar territory here in one glaring sense. Cinephiles will recall that in “A Beautiful Mind,” Nash (Russell Crowe) discovers people and events he perceives to be real are actually products of his condition. Without spoiling too much, all you need to know about “The Minds of Billy Milligan” is that it’s about the first person to be acquitted in court by invoking dissociative identity disorder. You see where this is going with Danny? At least in the Howard film it was about 2 hours of psychiatric drama. Here we don’t get answers until past the half-way point of the season. 

Then again, when the truth about Danny’s experiences comes to light we shouldn’t be that surprised, considering the writing and staging of so many events in this show are hard to believe. In fictionalizing his source material, Goldsman is free to turn Danny’s journey into a parade of clichés. School may be terrible but there are always good guys like Jonny (Levon Hawke), who not only accepts Danny but introduces him to drug dealing. Yitzak the Israeli is one of those supermen who looks tough, can beat up anyone and then shares words of macho wisdom. The most depth given to Rya is that she is of course so damaged she rattles innocent Danny by being so open about casual sex. Typical ‘70s needle drops are all over the place to the usual, slow motion scenes of kids in bell bottoms smoking weed, dancing in trances and boldly asking each other to make out. Such moments are still more believable than wild twists like Jonny saving Danny from a gangster in an exchange involving oral sex as payment.

Much of it feels like Goldsman and team having to pack many of the early episodes with enough material before the big reveal. The investigators eventually called in to figure out how Danny ended up firing at someone at Rockefeller Plaza are cardboard cutouts, such as Detective Matty Dunn (Thomas Sadoski). Amanda Seyfried, who has such a presence in “The Dropout” as Elizabeth Holmes, is mostly reduced at first to appearing at the beginning and end of episodes, interrogating Danny. We soon learn more about her as struggling with an ex-husband and being a single mother. Seyfried is never allowed to really let the character become more than these clichés. Tom Holland at least sheds a bit of his Peter Parker mold, going for darker territory here, and with longer hair. But like his turn in the Russo Brothers’ “Cherry,” it is good work trapped in a dragging production.

“The Crowded Room” has little to say about mental illness itself as a subject, using Danny’s condition instead as a plot device to be applied no differently than one of those Marvel twists. What Goldsman is trying to say is vastly unclear. He already shies away from the more unsavory aspects of the true story, such as Billy Milligan being a rapist. Instead of challenging the ideas, this show wants to coerce us into watching its mundane and recycled developments before pulling the rug. When it turns into a courtroom drama with Rya taking on the role of Danny’s defender, interest is by then truly evaporating. Apple TV has been specializing in somber material ranging from great to subpar. “The Crowded Room” invites us in and gives few reasons, aside from its stellar cast, for wanting to stay.

“The Crowded Room” begins streaming June 9 with new episodes premiering Fridays on Apple TV+.