It’s a bit baffling how overhyped The Crowded Room is, except for the fact that governs all media, which is that they’ve gotta overhype something. This ten-episode series, currently streaming on Apple TV+, was presumably chosen for the big ballyhoo treatment because it’s got the magic combination that has worked so often before: lurid, crime-oriented subject matter and slick prestige TV production values.

Spider-Man actor Tom Holland works hard in the lead role of Danny Sullivan, doing his best to invest an occasional moment of complicating menace into the role of a pitiable, troubled, victimized adolescent. He’s getting a lot of press by talking in interviews about how “the show did break me,” necessitating taking a year off to recover from his Method-acting exertions plus his role of producer on the series.

Danny’s a tormented teenager from an abusive home whose worried mother (Emmy Rossum) is unable to protect him from his violent, predatory stepfather (Will Chase). Danny gets arrested for attempted murder at the site of a 1979 shooting in New York City, though from the fragmentary sequence we’re shown, it looks as if he’s a mere accessory to a botched attempt at a shooting. Holland’s Danny is being portrayed as one of those sweet, nerdy, misfit teens in rote high school narratives who have deathless crushes on pretty girls, like the blond ringleted one named Isabel (Emma Laird) who leads him on relentlessly.