The President and the First Husband—yes, that’s correct—are throwing a State dinner for Australia, hoping to patch up some diplomatic problems. So The White House doors have been thrown open to some 200 guests, with pop star Kylie Minogue doing an impromptu live set. (The night’s entertainment was canceled unexpectedly—in exchange, though, she wants to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.)
There are other snafus: The calligraphy on the place-setting cards is unreadable, and someone described as an energy medium has tried to muck around with the dining room’s musty feng shui. Oh, and a corpse has just been discovered upstairs. He’s chief usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), who runs—ran—The White House’s huge, bustling and (as we’ll soon learn) highly contentious staff.
Between upstairs and downstairs, you couldn’t have more suspects if Agatha Christie’s Orient Express came equipped with 1,000 cars and a caboose.
Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), an obsessive birder who’s repeatedly described as “the world’s greatest detective,” is promptly called in as poor Mr. Wynter’s corpse is a-cooling. In a great theatrical flourish, she arrives with binoculars at the ready—they’ll come in handy for more than bird-watching—and dressed in a sporty tweed blazer with leather-patched shoulders.
You understand instantly that 1) she’s a wily eccentric, much like Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in Netflix’s Knives Out films; and that 2) she has been set loose in a statelier version of the Arconia from Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building.
What distinguishes The Residence from those other hit mysteries is that it’s from Scandal producer Shonda Rhimes. Scenes come and go with the fast click of a camera shutter, while the story careers through an unending series of switchbacks.
It’s like the current White House: never a dull moment.
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It’s unlike the current White House, though, in that nothing seems to be really registering anywhere outside Washington. The show is framed by a cheeky framework—Cupp’s investigation has prompted a Senate hearing, presided over by none other than former Senator Al Franken (playing a Senior Senator from Washington State). But beyond that, it has nothing to say much about politics. (But, then, neither did Scandal.) The president himself (Paul Fitzgerald) is a bland figure, although his husband (Barrett Foa) is an amusingly sneaky character, and the president’s grumpy, grousing, reclusive mother-in-law is played by none other than Jane Curtin.
Maybe those two, mother and son, should run the country, something along the lines of Nero and Agripinna in Rome. But, then, that didn’t turn out well.
The Residence is a very traditional mystery, something like Clue in the Capitol, as you piece together who-had-what-motive and who-was-where at the time that Mr. Wynter, a formidable figure with more enemies than friends, met his end. (You may very well end up guessing wrong, though. I certainly did.)
On those terms, The Residence is fun, breathless and entertaining. In a go-for-broke finale, the murder’s solution is spelled out by the triumphant Cupp in a fireworks display of exposition that goes on and on—like a filibuster—as she leads the large crowd of suspects from room to room. It’s a parody of the traditional White House tour.
One last note: The show is all but stolen by Edwina Findley as White House butler Sheila Cannon, who doesn’t mind helping herself to entire bottles of vodka. Her boozy, blustering sarcasm should be entered into evidence as a blunt instrument.
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All eight episodes of The Residence are streaming on Netflix.
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