The Crowded Room Review

It’s rare that I get angry while watching a series, but I was definitely angry whilst watching The Crowded Room, the new mystery box drama from AppleTV+. Now, over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out twists and turns in shows. Part of that comes from having to watch so much television for this job – after a while, you can see the threads of a story and figure out where they’re going. But some of it is just an innate sense of seeing the clues before the audience is meant to put them together and coming to the correct conclusion. But it’s rare that I can figure out the central reveal in a series during the opening moments of the series – which is precisely what happened while watching The Crowded Room. And then I got to spend six excruciatingly long episodes waiting for the series to tip its hand and reveal the truth of the matter to me. And that’s just unacceptable, because even if the main audience for this series doesn’t quite get the jump on the story as early as I did, I can almost guarantee the majority of viewers will put two and two together long before the series expects them to, leading to annoyance and disappointment with a limited series that could really have been something special but will instead be remembered as a waste of some solid performances (and excellent actors).

The Crowded Room is based on the non-fiction book “The Minds of Billy Milligan” (don’t google it unless you want the series spoiled), and follows Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland, who is also executive producing the series), a young man accused of six counts of attempted murder after he and his friend Ariana (a great Sasha Lane) open fire in Rockefeller Plaza. The series follows, largely via flashback, Danny’s story of growing up in a broken home (Emmy Rossum plays his mother while Will Chase takes on the role of Danny’s troubling step-father) and his feeling of being an outcast is laid bare, and we meet a series of individuals whose relationships with Danny define the man he becomes. The person tasked with making sense of Danny’s life story is Amanda Seyfried’s Rya Goodwin, a role that seems far too rote for someone of Seyfried’s talents, especially as Holland is allowed to go all-out in his performance while Seyfried is asked to be the straight man in the scenario. Even an episode mid-series that attempts to reset the story from Rya’s point of view – at least temporarily – fails to give her something truly meaty to dig into.

The central issue with The Crowded Room, however, is the pacing of the series. As I mentioned, it takes a full six episodes before the series begins to tackle the mystery at its heart: Just why Danny was trying to shoot someone in Rockefeller Plaza. To get there, we get a long, twisty story taking us from Danny’s childhood through high school through the aftermath of the shooting that saw him travel to London in search of his long-lost father (where he runs into a former associate of his dad’s, played with gusto by Jason Isaacs). Now, some background on our central character is necessary, particularly in fleshing out his motive for his crime, but my god, it’s a lot. And, if you have, like me, figured out the motive long before the reveal is made, it just feels like being force-fed more and more information that you don’t need to arrive at a conclusion you have already reached. It’s exhausting. Following the revelation, there are several episodes detailing the trial preparations for Danny’s defense as well as the trial itself – which, as a former attorney, plays far more fast and loose with the realities of legal practice than many other shows about the law (and had me constantly rolling my eyes).

A tighter, quicker run time of a mere five episodes would have provided significant time to let Holland show his acting abilities (he’s good, but again, you feel like he and the character are treading water for so much of the story, waiting for a chance for him to be let free to really perform), give Seyfried a few moments to shine (she’s really underused to a shocking degree throughout the series), and provide us the resolution the story needs (as it stands, the final episode includes a button that adds very little to the story we’ve just seen, and more of less serves as a chance to prove that Rya Goodwin is the genius we were told she is). With a cast this strong, and an interesting core story at the heart of the series, I expected a heck of a lot more from The Crowded Room. Perhaps things might have unfurled better for me had the central mystery not been solved in the opening moments of the series (I suspect I would have enjoyed the ride a great deal more, at least). But man, what a wasted opportunity.

The Crowded Room premieres on AppleTV+ on June 9. All ten episodes of the series were provided for review.