The Crowded Room Uses DID as Prestige Fodder—and We Can Finally Talk About It
Photo Courtesy of Apple TV+
The ableism in America’s care, medical, and judicial systems, which have barely improved over its few hundred years of operation, is staggering. As is demonstrated by a prosecutor in Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room—a fictionalized story inspired by the life of Billy Mulligan, the first defendant in America acquitted because of a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—courts are more likely to see an insanity plea as a desperate attempt for conniving criminals to get a more lenient sentence, rather than acknowledge that the chemical balance of a defendant’s brain left them with less control than others over how they behave. Such judgements are probably, in part, an act of denial; it would involve acknowledging that society’s treatment of unwell people is as culpable as the perpetrator for the crime they committed.
But despite good intentions trying to correct such prejudices, film and television hasn’t had the best track record with portraying mental illness, especially dissociative disorders. The opportunity to play a character so rich in trauma can be tantalizing to actors: it’s flashy, attention grabbing, and involves a lot of Capital-A Acting. Their eagerness to show how capable they are of doing lots of different performances within one character is probably why we’ve not seen many portrayals of DID that don’t feel at least a little bit exploitative.
But while The Crowded Room fares better than its predecessors (being objectively less thrill-seeking than Primal Fear or Split), audiences expecting a nuanced take on a difficult condition will likely be disappointed. Tom Holland stars as Danny Sullivan, who on the orders of his strung-out housemates, opens fire on a man in broad daylight in Rockefeller Center. His stretches of memory loss complicate the extensive interrogations he finds himself in with psychiatrist Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), but bit by bit they manage to sketch out a young life of neglect and repression. But the 10-episode series is both too careful and too confused: a resistance to tackle its subject matter in all its complexity is compounded by structural choices that will likely disengage viewers before the story fully gets going.
Tom Holland is now doing what must be one of the most demoralising press tours in recent memory. The Crowded Room was slated in initial reviews written by critics infuriated that they could not discuss the premise of the show thanks to punitive spoiler embargos. If you remember when The Crowded Room was announced, and heard what the premise was, the inspiration behind the story, and what was intriguing about the part Holland was set to play, you might be confused watching the first half of the show.
Only now has The Crowded Room, having aired its sixth episode, confirmed what it’s about, but by now all potential buzz has dissipated and the whole enterprise is well and truly botched. Tom Holland must keep addressing the poor critical reaction, genuinely convinced that the high audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes means anything other than his stans flocking to a website where they account for the vast majority of the people voting on the show. It’s not a fate I’d wish on any man, but it still doesn’t mean his show is any good.