The Crowded Room on Apple TV+
Graham Hillard
The Crowded Room is dismayingly bad television, a sure contender for the worst drama of the year with a puncher’s chance to carry the decade. A psychological thriller that neither thrills nor understands psychology, it pairs the freshness of a Matlock rerun with the subtlety of a straitjacket. That the series was acquired by Apple TV+, until recently our most reliable streaming service, merely compounds the insult. Halfway through the show’s trailer, I knew with absolute certainty what the plot-destroying “reveal” would turn out to be. Ten minutes into the pilot, I wondered how any sentient human being could fail to guess it.
That Apple TV+ is in some denial about its latest offering is poignantly evident. Acquiring screener access to the show, I also received a bold-text missive prohibiting all manner of spoilers. Some of the enjoined items would be reasonable were not the series so intent on spoiling itself. Others are so intrinsic to the show’s nature that they can hardly be dodged. I cannot divulge, for example, the occupation practiced by Amanda Seyfried’s pantsuited protagonist, never mind that her work informs The Crowded Room’s structure and drives its story. How, then, to convey the actress’s awfulness? Call to mind Seyfried’s mannered, overpraised performance as fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (The Dropout), and then add such lines as “There are a number of dispositive factors I’m not seeing.” For audiences who have thrilled to the actress’s transformation from sex kitten to poor man’s Tilda Swinton, The Crowded Room represents a heady culmination.
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The series’s other star, Tom Holland (of Spider-Man fame), is equally terrible but can at least be discussed. Lean, haunted, and so obviously deranged that one wonders how he buttons his pants every morning, Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a young man under arrest for attempted murder. In the pilot’s opening scene, we see him pull a gun in Rockefeller Center, accompanied by a mysterious accomplice. Though this enigmatic sidekick (played by American Honey’s Sasha Lane) does the shooting that follows, Danny is left holding the weapon. That Lane’s character seemingly vanishes into thin air seconds later is one of the gears turning The Crowded Room’s wheels.
And so we proceed, Danny under lock and key and Seyfried’s Rya Goodwin — I daren’t say too much — questioning him about his thoughts and feelings. Hilariously, Rya’s actual job title is treated as a revelation later in the series, as if the interaction between the two leads has been other than telescopically clear. Danny, a conspicuously damaged young man, is being interrogated at some length about the workings of his mind. Rya is practically filling out a grant application as the two converse. The reader may draw his own conclusions.
To be fair, The Crowded Room wouldn’t have worked even if its creators had prayed less fervently to the gods of narrative concealment. The show’s writing, primarily by Batman & Robin scribe Akiva Goldsman, is so lazily on the nose that key exchanges feel like lightly dramatized talking points. (“Trauma is the closest thing we have to time travel,” Rya says in one groan-inducing moment.) Nearly every role is miscast, from Broadway star Will Chase as Danny’s obnoxious stepfather to Emma Laird (Mayor of Kingstown) as the young man’s shockingly unobservant girlfriend.
Most damaging of all is the exceptional unease with which the program moves between its locked-room interview sessions and its flashbacks to Danny’s prior life. At an overlong 10 episodes, the show has no choice but to string out the latter despite their uneven (to put it kindly) dramatic significance. An early drug deal gone wrong, for instance, is a small masterpiece of jumbled storytelling, contributing little besides a needless veneer of racial condescension. Then, there’s Danny’s retreat from his childhood home to the flophouse next door, where he befriends the previously mentioned Lane character and an Israeli immigrant played by Lior Raz. That’s fruitless in a different way. Supporting players Ariana and Yitzhak are among the most important contributors to Danny’s story, yet I didn’t believe them for a minute. To explain why would give away the game in its entirety. Suffice it to say that the series’s biggest “surprise” lies at their doorstep. Once one discovers the key, the entire edifice collapses.
The Crowded Room was inspired by Daniel Keyes’s 1981 book The Minds of Billy Milligan. It says so right there in the title sequence, which also features — get this — a man being chased by his own shadow. Watching the show’s trailer, one hears Danny confessing to “blank spots” in his memory and a detective complaining that important characters can’t be found. Scenes in which Danny and his friends interact with outsiders are staged and scripted with extreme care. In short, the series has the paranoia of an undercover spy but the gabbiness of a sixth-grade girl. Its creators are so desperate to stop me from spilling their secrets that they have forgotten to keep them themselves.
Such a state of affairs does more, it should be clear, than throw up roadblocks in front of television critics. Because the show’s revelations render much of its dramatic work moot, a strange hollowness attends the proceedings, as if we have knowingly been sold counterfeit goods. Since most viewers will see the twists coming, the program is unconvincing from the start. We grasp right away that we are being lied to.
The result of all this is a show that can’t tell its story because it has no story to tell. Watch an episode or two for the unintentional comedy, sure. But three’s a crowd.
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Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and the managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.