Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Crowded Room’ On Apple TV+, Where Tom Holland Is A Teen Who Unpacks His Complex Life After He’s Accused Of A Shooting

Sometimes you just get a feeling when you watch the first episode of a show, know what we mean? The episode could be good overall, but there are frustrating elements to it that throw up yellow flags as far as what the rest of the season might be like, and you’re not sure whether you want to spend more time with it. A new Apple TV+ drama starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried throws up plenty of those flags.

THE CROWDED ROOM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young man is shown sitting in a subway car. He’s holding a paper bag.

The Gist: Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) is told not to look at the bag he’s holding by Ariana (Sasha Lane), the girl who is on the subway with him. He tells her that he still wants to do this, saying “He’s not gonna hurt anyone anymore, ok?” They get out near Rockefeller Center, and find the person they’re looking for. Danny points the gun in the bag at him but freezes, which is when Ariana grabs the gun and starts shooting wildly as the man runs. After she drops it, Danny grabs the gun and runs from the police.

We next see him enter a suburban house, out of breath. A balding, Israeli accented man named Yitzhak (Lior Raz) yells, “What did you do?”, gives him money and a passport and says, “Go find your father.” Sometime later, we see Danny burning something; suddenly the police surround the house and arrest Danny; both Yitzhak and Ariana are missing.

In custody, the NYPD calls in Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), a special interrogator, to try to get information from Billy about Ariana, Yitzhak and the shooting. He’s reluctant to pin the shooting on her, even though he knows he could go away for it in her place. When she asks him about how he came into contact with the two missing people at the boarding house where he was arrested, he launches into his story.

Two years prior, in 1977, Danny is living with his mother Candy (Emmy Rossum) and stepfather Marlin Reid (Will Chase). Things are tense to say the least, as he and Marlin don’t get along, and Marlin tells Candy to her face that she’s powerless to intercede in what’s going on between the two of them. Danny isn’t super popular in school but he has his buddies Jonny (Levon Hawke) and Mike (Sam Vartholomeos) to lean on.

At a party, he sees a new girl named Anabel (Emma Laird), who comes to him later on and asks if they’d like to smoke weed together. He wants to, but has nothing to offer. Of course, he crushes hard on the girl, and Mike and Jonny hatch a scheme to get them an ounce of weed that they can sell at school, involving Marlin’s new-fangled ATM card.

Also interesting is that someone has moved into the “ghost house” across the street from Billy; a stocky, bald Israeli named Yitzhak who seems to be friendly but guarded.

The plan, involving a dangerous late-night buy from a local dealer almost goes south when Billy runs afoul of a bully who’s friends with Annabel, and he almost gets caught by the school principal. But he gets his pot-fueled makeout session with Anabel; that, however, crashes and burns the next day. The principal finds a joint on the floor next to Billy, and he runs all the way home, where he not only finds out that Marlin knows the money is missing, but then the bully and his friends gang up on him and beat the snot out of him. Yitzhak saves Billy, and when he enters the ghost house, he meets Ariana.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The vibe of The Crowded Room has the vibe of Black Bird, where it seems that much of the show is told in flashback.

Our Take: The Crowded Room, created by Akiva Goldsman (Holland is one of the executive producers) and based on The Minds Of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes. The first episode sets up a lot in the flashback, but not enough to really get an idea of what’s really going on with Danny, why he got in this situation with Ariana, and just who it was they wanted to kill in Rockefeller Center.

It’s hard to review this show without revealing a ton of spoilers about the book it was based on or the show itself, but the storytelling method that Goldsman employs is decidedly nonlinear. In fact, the flashback via interrogation employed in the first episode will likely be what we see throughout, as Billy examines his life to get to the bottom of what exactly happened.

What it does feel like during the first episode is that we’re going to get a whole lot of story without a whole lot of plot advancement. Sure, we find out just how Billy met Yitzhak and Ariana in the first episode, and of course the other elements introduced to us will likely come back into play at some point, but at times the first episode felt more like a Seventies coming of age drama and not like the psychological thriller we were expecting to see.

Sure, Seyfried and Holland are effective in the first episode, though we don’t see a ton of Seyfriend or some of the show’s other big names, like Emmy Rossum. But we watched the first episode wondering just how long we’d have to invest before the story gets to a point where it’ll be actually interesting and not just a nebulous story about a teenager with some oddball friends.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Rya asks Billy about his twin brother Adam, who died when Billy was younger. “Where did they all go?” she asks. “What exactly are you accusing me of?” he asks.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Lior Raz, just because we’re happy seeing him playing something other than a Mossad agent (at least as far a we know in the first episode).

Most Pilot-y Line: The entire scene where Billy and his friends bought weed at a local playground felt like it was from a different era, where drug dealers were always unhinged, threatening, and portrayed by Black actors. Yes, it takes place in the ’70s, but it feels like that scene could have been done better.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but this is a really tentative recommendation. The performances in The Crowded Room should be compelling enough to hook you in, but we’re just not sure the story is going to progress fast enough for people to not throw their hands up in frustration by the second or third episode.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.