Review | Tom Holland’s new The Crowded Room gets on the viewer’s nerves, even if the series falters towards the end

The Crowded Room is an Apple TV+ suspense drama series created by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman of A Beautiful Mind. Starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried.

Apple TV+ novelty series The Crowded Room is based on Daniel Keyesin to the award-winning, true-life book published in 1981. The ten-part series was created by the Oscar winner Akiva Goldsmanwhich is known for movies A Beautiful Mind and I am Legend of manuscripts as well as Fringebehind the TV series.

In the series, the name of the main character has changed from Billy Milligan of the original work to Danny Sullivan. He is played by the Spider-Man star in the series Tom Hollandwhich is by Michael J. Fox I meet those child-faced actors who, at almost 30 years old, pass off as teenagers relatively believably.

Set in the 1970s, The Crowded Room begins with the scene where young Danny Sullivan is arrested for a shooting incident in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The crime, the investigator investigating the crime and finally the court proceedings act as a reduced narrative arc.

The Crowded Room features a traditional crime series setting, where a specialist in his field, in this case Dr. Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), sits in the same room with a suspected criminal and tries to get inside his head by repeating the events leading up to that moment with the suspect.

In that moment of the present, only Holland and Seyfried act, and the setting tries to keep the results of the possible crimes in the dark from the viewer. The past is opened as flashbacks.

Other roles include, among others Will Chase, Emmy Rossum, Sasha Lane, Lior Raz, Christopher Abbot, Jason Isaacs and Thomas Sadowski. In the flashbacks, young Danny is played Zachary Golinger.

We were told by Apple not to reveal the twists or endings of the series, which of course we wouldn’t do anyway. But I can’t help but wonder that, despite this, the creators themselves have given the series such a name that almost every viewer can add 1+1 after the first episode at the latest.

In its first half, The Crowded Room bases its narrative tension on the fact that it succeeds in deceiving the viewer. You cannot succeed very well in cheating, because even someone like me who has not read the original work can guess the idea of ​​the story right away.

During the first episodes, the setting of the series is because of this, because the authors handle their story as if it were a very cunning thriller. The dialogue and the cuts of the scenes jostle to cover up twists and turns that are already frustratingly obvious to the viewer.

At this point, the attention turns from following the actual story to how any attempted fraud was carried out and how well it might succeed. This was hardly the authors’ intention.

That expected tension is helplessly missing.

Since no “twist” comes as a surprise, it would have been worthwhile for the creators to focus on deepening their actual topic, leave the crowded mystery to less and modify the genre more in the direction of drama instead of their unnecessary secrecy.

It was good that we got to see the series in advance as a whole, because about halfway through, the series changes form from a mystery to a courtroom drama thriller. In the first half of the record, I was already afraid for a moment that they would try to stretch the mystery to ten episodes.

In that case, the series would have been completely unbearable.

The latter half saves the whole to some extent and The Crowded Room manages to build itself into a touching and interesting courtroom drama from time to time.

In addition to his Spider-Man role, Holland has confirmed that he is quite a versatile actor in dramatic roles as well. An example of this has been, for example, Netflix’s crime drama The Devil All the Time and suspense drama on Apple TV+ Cherrywhere the ex-soldier played by Holland suffers from PTSD and becomes addicted to drugs because of it.

At the center of The Crowded Room, Holland gets to loosen up in his multi-faceted role, but despite ten episodes, the whole feels like just scratching the surface. The in-depth point of view, told through the eyes of the character himself, is missing when time is wasted on a crowded mystery.

The Crowded Room is a suspense drama about a serious and very interesting subject that frustrates its viewers because, despite its initial aspiration, it fails to keep its secrets secrets beyond the initial meters. However, the suspense series gets a little better towards the end when the mystery turns into a courtroom drama.

The Crowded Room starts on Apple TV+ on June 9 with three episodes, after which the series will be released one episode per week. We received a preview of all ten episodes for review.