‘The Crowded Room’ showrunner Akiva Goldsman on the ‘universal’ nature of trauma [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“I was aware of it for a really long time,” says “The Crowded Room” creator and showrunner Akiva Goldsman about the source material for his 10-episode limited series about a young man with a fractured psyche. “It’s one of those narrative objects that actually was served better by not trying to be stuffed into two hours. So I don’t think it was much more than good luck that the form was now available for a longer narrative.” We talked with Goldsman as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV showrunners panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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“The Crowded Room” is a fictionalized take on “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” a nonfiction book about the first man ever acquitted of a crime by pleading insanity due to dissociative identity disorder, known at the time as multiple personality disorder. This version of the story follows Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland), who was involved in a shooting incident in New York City, and Rya (Amanda Seyfried), a psychologist who begins to suspect there’s more to his case than meets the eye.
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“I smuggled my own life experience into this narrative framework, so the character of Danny is really a hybridized version of Billy Milligan and of me,” Goldsman explains. “The truth about trauma is it’s something we all experience one way or another. That’s the universal aspect of the show, and ultimately it is about all sorts of different kinds of trauma — obviously, most notably Danny’s sexual abuse in childhood, but also the show deals with alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, with all the faces of the way the heart and mind react to traumatic events.”
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