variety.com
09.06.2023 / 19:19
Tom Holland’s ‘The Crowded Room’ Is Unfortunately Empty: TV Review
Alison Herman TV Critic Over 20 years ago, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman penned the script for “A Beautiful Mind,” the Oscar-winning biopic of mathematician and diagnosed schizophrenic John Nash. To convey Nash’s subjective experience of his condition, “A Beautiful Mind” pulled a bait-and-switch. Early in the film, we meet Nash’s college roommate, who becomes his lifelong friend; later, it’s revealed the roommate was a figment of Nash’s imagination. At the time, the twist was effective enough to earn Goldsman an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The limited series “The Crowded Room,” created by Goldsman for Apple TV+, attempts the same trick to greatly diminished returns. A simple Wikipedia search shows that “The Crowded Room” was inspired by Billy Milligan, the first defendant acquitted by invoking a case of dissociative identity disorder in the late 1970s. But ahead of the show’s release, critics were asked not to disclose the fractured mental state of Danny Sullivan, the Milligan analog played with doe-eyed naiveté of Tom Holland. This puzzled me, given the eminently Googleable nature of the premise. Then I started watching.