‘The Crowded Room’: Spider-Man Gets Lost in a Lame Whodunit

When TV critics are given screeners of upcoming series, the episodes are often accompanied by a letter from the showrunner asking us to not reveal certain plot points. Sometimes, these requests are eminently reasonable: Succession creator Jesse Armstrong didn’t want us telling our readers about the big thing that happened in this season’s third episode, and didn’t want us even hinting that it was a notable installment in any way, so that viewers would be as gobsmacked by it as we were. Sometimes, they are just silly, like the time Mad Men boss Matthew Weiner told us we could not mention that in the series’ next season, the ad agency had expanded its offices to include a second floor. And sometimes, they make writing a review nearly impossible, because they ask critics to not reveal the very premise of the show, and/or details that are from the show’s opening minutes.

All of which brings us to the new Apple TV+ miniseries The Crowded Room, starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried. Created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, the show opens in 1979 with Holland’s troubled young Danny and his friend Ariana (Sasha Lane) attempting to shoot a man outside of Rockefeller Center. The two are separated in the melee that follows, Danny is arrested at the rooming house where he has lived with Ariana and shady Israeli landlord Yitzak (Lior Raz), and soon he is subject of a series of interviews by Seyfried’s Rya, who wants to know Danny’s entire life story and how he arrived at this violent moment.

Goldsman’s letter to reviewers includes a Do Not Reveal list with a half-dozen items. One of them involves what Rya does for a living, even though it couldn’t be more obvious from her very first conversation with Danny. The main one, though, involves the entire premise of the show, and the reason that Rya takes such an interest in Danny’s case.

Why have I just spent three paragraphs on an extreme case of TV critic inside baseball? Because that very desire to be secretive badly undermines everything Goldsman is trying to do with The Crowded Room.

Where most instances of “please don’t tell your readers what the show is about” involve details that can be gleaned from the very first episode, and often from the first five or ten minutes, The Crowded Room takes until the sixth of its 10 episodes to begin to acknowledge its actual premise, and until early in its seventh to openly confirm it. So on that score, you can perhaps understand Goldsman’s request. But Goldsman’s choice to structure the story this way does far more harm than good.

The problem is twofold. The first is that Danny’s autobiography, without the context of what’s revealed later on, is glum and tedious, and in no way built to carry more than five hours of screen time. (Like a lot of streaming series these days, this one feels like a feature film script that got expanded too much once no movie studio would buy it.) There are long passages about his difficulty fitting in in high school (even though we see him exulting in the unwavering support of his two best friends), the emotional abuse of his stepfather Marlin (Will Chase), dark encounters with a cartoonishly evil Black drug dealer, and lots of other unremarkable bits of misery porn.

The second problem is that it could not be more glaringly obvious what the show is really about, long before Rya and Danny talk about it. The series is based on a not-obscure Daniel Keyes non-fiction novel called The Minds of Billy Milligan(*). Even if you’re not familiar with the source material, nor the case that inspired it, the story makes no sense if it’s not about what it turns out to be about. In particular, the early episodes never bother to explain why Rya is involved in the case at all, much less why she is spending so much time with Danny. And every question she asks about potential holes in Danny’s anecdotes — why, for instance, he can describe in great detail things that Ariana experienced that he wasn’t witness to — only make it more clear. The revelation is such an overused trope — even Goldsman himself has deployed it before — that it would be more shocking if it wasn’t there at all.

(*) Both John Cusack and Leonardo DiCaprio were set to play Billy in previous attempts at adaptation, both of them as movies. Cusack’s version even had James Cameron attached as director. Amusingly, both actors wound up starring in other movies featuring a lot of unofficial thematic crossover with Keyes’ book. Hey, if you can’t get the real thing made…

For the most part, it feels like TV has — or should have — moved beyond this kind of puzzle-box structure. Audiences have become too conditioned to look at series as puzzles to be solved, and attempts to outwit them are almost always counter-productive. Look at what happened to Westworld. A huge hit in its first season, it began hemorrhaging viewers as its plots became harder and harder to follow, which was the creative team’s response to how early everyone spotted what was meant to be the debut season’s big twist. Beyond that, this approach discourages the audience — whether they’ve figured out the twist already, or can simply tell that all is not what it seems to be — from emotionally engaging with the story and the characters in the exact way that Goldsman clearly wants them to. In this case, it also means that a couple of later episodes have to be devoted to re-showing us material we’ve already seen, now with added context, like a magician who doesn’t think you’ll properly appreciate that he sawed a woman in half until he shows you how the trick actually works.

The maddening part is that the last few episodes, where every secret is out in the open, are a vast improvement over what’s come before. The Crowded Room doesn’t suddenly become great, but Holland, Seyfried, Christopher Abbott (as Danny’s beleaguered public defender), and Emmy Rossum (as Danny’s mother) all do their best work in this phase of things. The nature of the material all but invites Holland to start chewing the scenery at this stage, but he manages to sell things in an impressively restrained fashion. And there are some genuinely affecting, powerful moments once all the chicanery is set aside.

So, no, I will not come out and tell you the things Akiva Goldsman has asked me not to. But everyone, and not just TV critics, would have been better served if The Crowded Room had been made in a way that such secrecy wasn’t necessary.

The first three episodes of The Crowded Room begin streaming on June 9 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10.

From Rolling Stone US.