I’ve taken to disparaging a lot of the streaming series I’m pitched and that I get around to sampling or even reviewing as “drip drip drip” storytelling.

Even the cliffhanger serials of yore, the ones that Lucas and Spielberg were referencing in “Star Wars” and the Indiana Jones franchises, got to the point quicker.

These days, it’s backfill/backfill/backfill that story. But wait…something finally happened. Yay.

Perhaps the streamers have found an algorithm that predicts how far you can hang onto the viewer before they give up. Is it three dull episodes, or does that come when episode four is paddling in the same circle, just a different pond?

Case in point, “The Crowded Room,” a new Apple TV+ series by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. He adapted the story of a real-life accused criminal whose groundbreaking contribution to American jurisprudence was being the first to be acquitted by reason of disassociative identity disorder.

Goldsman took that case — already the subject of a Netflix docu-series — and its late ’70s New York milieu, fleshed it out with details from his own life, and cooked up 10 hours of paranoid delusions and unreliable memories by our accused man (Tom Holland) framed in the loooooooong interogations by a psychologist/interrogator, played by Amanda Seyfried.

Danny (Holland) and the mysterious Arianna (Sasha Lane) stalk a man through Manhattan, taking their shot at shooting him in the middle of the crowded Rockefeller Plaza. Danny is the only one hone the cops caught.

The police are looking for the missing Arianna, and the elusive Israeli (Lior Raz) who took Danny and her in and defended him against a bullying stepfather (Will Chase) and bullying classmates.

Our interrogator wants to know where they are, about Danny’s first encounters with them, and “be as precise as possible,” because, you know, this is a mini-series and we’ve got a lot of time to fill.

We’re treated to sequence after sequence, episode after episode, introducing characters who seem like the perfect supportive friend/lover/savior/protector, just when Danny mght be expected to first encounter that “type” of person, or just when Danny needs someone just like this as he flees that stepfather and his unable-to-protect-him-mother (Emmy Rossum), makes time with the pretty new transfer student (Emma Laird) and comes of age, learning about love, sexuality and drugs in the suburban and even urban New York of the late ’70s.

A lovely shot here and there, a few violent set-pieces, doled out one or two per episode, and the handle we think we have on this from the start is tested and twisted as we acknowledge there may be not just one “unreliable narrator.”

Apple TV+ served up a trio of episodes to draw viewers in, and my hat’s off to anybody so enthralled by this slow-walking thriller that they’re ready to invest in the whole series after that opening weekend. I found the first-three over-detailed and dull, and I say that as someone who lived through the ’70s and owned most of the LPs sampled in this Original Hits soundtrack.

I noted the verbal anachronisms and the run-of-the-mill inaccuracies. Danny expresses a concern about being 18 and “draftable” five years after the draft ended, for instance.

As the show jumps to episodes in London (with Jason Isaac) and elsewhere, I just shrugged and accepted that this is just par for the streaming serial course — a ton of details, a lot of “life being lived,” little of it moving the plot forward.

With preview screeners, I got a lot farther into than you did. No, it doesn’t get quicker, more insightful, more engrossing and entertaining. It doesn’t get better.

At least “The Night Of” (2016) made interrogation reconstructions interesting. At least “Ozark” (2017) introduced characters and killed them, establishing the stakes, right from the start.

As least “Ted Lasso” (2020) was fish-out-of-water cute with characters you could identify with and/or root for. For a while.

A couple of the performances here are pitched at a level that’s almost engaging. But wandering through vivid recreations of New York’s (gay) club scene on the cusp of New Wave, London stock footage exteriors and generic interiors becomes almost sleep inducing.

There are NO STAKES IN “The Crowded Room.” How did the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “A Beautiful Mind” as well as “A Time to Kill” and “The Da Vinci Code” forget that? The characters are neither relatable nor that interesting.

As one looks at the aggregated reviews for popular serials, it’s easy to get the idea that nobody “gets” that “WandaVision” and “The Mosquito Coast” or This Week’s Hot Topic/Series or that “Lasso” or “Ozark” later season is all narrative filler decorated with Easter Eggs and the odd gripping or winning moment.

But others are noticing. Just the other day, a Twitter user tagged @topherflorence complained “back in the day if u did a tv show called “Surf Dracula” you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long-ass flashback about how he got the surfboard…”

Which hits the nail right on the head, doesn’t it? They’re all “Crowded Rooms,” and drip by drip by drip, there’s no sense confusing clutter for quality.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, Sasha Lane, Lior Raz, Emmy Rossum, Emma Laird, Will Chase, Jason Isaac.

Credits: Series created and written by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” by Daniel Keyes.

Running time: 10 episodes @58 minutes each.