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The story begins with the crime that Danny’s arrested for. It seems pretty straightforward, but things quickly become confused and, frankly, boring. That’s because the writers start messing with the timeline in the interrogation room. Rya, the investigator, seems competent and professional, but it’s hard to understand why she isn’t saying certain key things. At the same time, it’s hard to understand why, in flashbacks, everyone thinks Danny is so weird. He may be a little odd, but the talk about him seems to be out of proportion to what we’re seeing.
The trouble is that we don’t know key things about Danny for the first five episodes, and instead of giving us an “aha” moment when the reason his story has been so muddled is revealed, it’s annoying that it took so long. I can understand what Akiva Goldsman, who’s also the writer or co-writer on all of these episodes, was trying to do. He wrote the movie “A Beautiful Mind” back in 2001 and that didn’t reveal the protagonist’s condition until later in the story either. But what worked for “A Beautiful Mind” does not work for “The Crowded Room.”
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First, the protagonists’ conditions are not the same and, therefore, don’t benefit from the same treatment. Second, television is a different medium than film, and what worked beautifully in the confines of a two-hour movie doesn’t work as well in 10 hour-long episodes, especially when you have a week in between them to wonder about what just happened. So we get taken through Danny’s story for the first five episodes, but something feels off the whole time. More importantly, things are boring because the most interesting thing about Danny’s story is being withheld.
