The Crowded Room review: lethargic Apple TV+ thriller with Tom Holland struggles to justify its existence

The Crowded Room is, in a roundabout sense, a true crime thriller. It’s not a straightforward dramatisation in the same sense as, say, Ryan Murphy’s Jeffrey Dahmer or Andrew Cunanan series; instead it’s a fictionalised take on a real person, with star Tom Holland playing “Danny Sullivan” in a sort of ‘true crime with the serial numbers filed off’ style choice. It’s not a secret who Holland’s character is based on, with the real historical figure’s name featured a) in the original commissioning announcement, so therefore b) all over Wikipedia, and perhaps more importantly c) in the actual opening credits of the series. (Which, just as an aside, soundssound far too similar to The X-Files theme to be taken wholly seriously here.) 

Ahead of the release of the series, Apple TV+ have asked critics to avoid reference to the inspiration for the series and said individual’s historical significance – and therefore, essentially, the actual premise of The Crowded Room. Spoilerphobia is always a tricky one with true crime drama, where the option to look up what happens in the end isn’t just readily available but implicitly encouraged too; in this instance, the inspiration for “Danny Sullivan” was the subject of a popular-ish Netflix documentary a few years back, so there’s a solid chance people will recognise the name in those titles anyway.

Watching The Crowded Room, the request makes a certain degree of sense. The series opens with Danny on the subway into New York, accompanied by his friend Ariana (Sasha Lane), who urges him to shoot a man in the middle of the street. It picks up again a few days later, with Danny now in custody and Ariana nowhere to be found, being discussed by police officers who believe they might’ve caught a serial killer – a novelty for them, something they’re even excited by, but a conclusion that interrogator Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried, coasting throughout) seems less convinced by. Danny maintains his innocence throughout. 

It's building to a twist, and it takes a long time to get there. After a pacey opening sequence – an initially, if incorrectly, promising sign that The Crowded Room might be more dynamic than most true crime drama – the series settles into something much more lethargic, delving deep into Danny’s past to explain his present. The Crowded Room starts to feel like the best example of that recurring phenomenon of television shows that should’ve been movies, two hours of story stretched thin across ten episodes. An expanded episode count can offer the opportunity for a deeper exploration of a character’s psychology, but that needs to be paired with some genuine insight to feel like more than an extended exercise in procrastination. As is, flashbacks to Danny and friends’ high school misadventures, each looking like the only thirty-somethings that even Never Have I Ever ruled too unconvincing to play teenagers, are absolutely interminable.

With that in mind, it’s strange that The Crowded Room chooses to telegraph that (self-imposed) twist itself so overtly and so obviously right from the beginning. Even if you don’t know who Danny Sullivan is based on, you’ll likely be able to put together what’s going on – the ‘twist’ is foreshadowed early in dialogue best described as “laying it on thick”, while the direction relies on the same well-worn visual language we’ve seen before every other time this trick has been deployed. It’s one thing when The Crowded Room traffics in cliches like Danny’s unusually-skilful paintings of a girl he’s obsessed with; it’s another when The Crowded Room makes painfully apparent in the first minute what it won’t actually concede until the fifth hour of the show (which is itself a retelling of the opening episodes from a new perspective). 

All of that puts an even greater pressure on Holland to anchor the drama. He struggles. The Crowded Room is not, to say the least, the post-Marvel acting showcase Holland likely hoped it would be; he doesn’t so much disappear into the role as he seems overwhelmed by it entirely, completely incapable of acting as the still point necessary for the series to work. When the other shoe does (eventually, at glacial pace) drop, it becomes clear why Holland might’ve been drawn to the material on a cynical career strategy level, but as the vulnerable everyman type character gives way to something more demanding – but by no means subtler – it only exposes… well, either the limits of his performance or his difficulties choosing worthwhile projects.

The Crowded Room feels like it is – or, at least, should be – the endpoint of a particular style of true crime drama. It struggles ever to meaningfully justify its own existence, not just in terms of how it feels its needlessly excessive runtime or the cliches it relies on like a crutch; it’s deeply lacking, too, in any kind of insight or point, doing little to make the case that it’s recreating real life trauma for anything beyond the faint hope of an Emmy. Well, “real life” – one of the more substantive differences between Danny Sullivan and his inspiration is the crime committed, which feels like a tacit concession that there is something unpalatable and even unethical about true crime drama.

Defending himself during an interrogation scene, Danny insists that “there are some things you know because you saw them, some things you know because you read them, and some things you know because you’ve been told them a thousand times.” The Crowded Room feels like the thousandth and first time – enough already.

The Crowded Room begins on Apple TV+ on Friday 9 June with its first three episodes. New episodes will be available each week thereafter. I watched six of an eventual ten episodes before writing this review; you can read more of our coverage of The Crowded Room here, and find more of our TV reviews here.

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