'The Crowded Room' Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Not Kind to Tom Holland's Apple TV+ Show

By Michael Hein

The new Apple TV+ series starring Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, and Emmy Rossum is not performing well with the critics. The Crowded Room is a psychological thriller about a young man charged with a gruesome crime in Manhattan in 1979, and the interrogator who gradually uncovers his mysterious past. The first batch of reviews calls the show "generic" and long-winded, and they've accused it of leaning too hard on the star power of its cast.

The Crowded Room is inspired by the 1981 non-fiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes, and was created for TV by Akiva Goldsman and then developed by Todd Graff. It premiered its first three episodes on Friday, June 9, with seven more to air each Friday through July 28. However, many critics have already seen the whole show and warn that there is not much to look forward to. The show has 30 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes so far and only eight of them are considered "positive." What makes this even more staggering is the largely positive review from Rotten Tomatoes users – with over 250 user reviews so far, the show has a 92 percent "fresh" audience score.

Like many shows, this one has a strong start, but the reputations of psychological thrillers rest largely on satisfying conclusions, so perhaps the negative reviews will make more sense later on. Audiences may also be drawn in by the idea that this show is based on a true story – Keyes' book tells the true story of William Stanley Milligan but does so with all the flourish of a novel, not a historical account. Milligan's case set a huge precedent for the U.S. legal system, though describing its outcome would likely spoil the ending of The Crowded Room.

The show is streaming now on Apple TV+ with new episodes every Friday for the next seven weeks. Here's a look at how critics are responding to see if it might be a good summertime binge for you.

Too Slow

Rolling Stone critic Alan Sepinwall summed up one of the biggest complaints about this show by saying that it takes too long to get to the point will leave audiences "bored to death." He wrote: "The Crowded Room takes until the sixth of its 10 episodes to begin to acknowledge its actual premise... But Goldsman's choice to structure the story this way does far more harm than good."

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Bad Marketing

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(Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+)

Ed Power of The Telegraph wrote that viewers likely won't get what they are expecting with The Crowded Room - probably in a bad way. While it has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama, Power thinks it is more comparable to "pulpy" thrillers with monumental twists, citing Fight Club and The Sixth Sense as examples.

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Star Power

The New York Post's Lauren Sarner seemed to praise Holland, Seyfried, and Rossum while at the same time saying that their star power is not enough to save this show. Like others, she felt the show's failings fell largely on the script.

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Circuitous

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(Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+)

Many critics argued that The Crowded Room leans too heavily on misdirection and false leads that don't ultimately go anywhere. In a review for Variety, Alison Herman wrote that the show "is left with a vacuum where a hook should be," while Richard Roeper of The Chicago-Sun Times wrote: "The false leads and acts of misdirection grow tiresome."

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Comparisons

Some of the show's positive reviews may turn viewers away as much as the negative ones. For example, Rohan Naahar of The Indian Express compared the show to the controversial 2019 film Joker, writing that both are stories "about empathy, told through the perspective of a character who never received any."

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Sensitivity

In another positive review for The Playlist, Emma Fraser praised the show for at least handling the subject of mental illness with care – likely an improvement from the source material.

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Directionless

Finally, Emma Keates of The A.V. Club articulated a popular take on the show's lack of thematic direction, writing: "The show can't seem to figure out if it wants to be a shocking crime drama or an earnest treatise on the stigmas surrounding mental illness, and as a result, it ends up as neither."

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