Late in the new Netflix limited series The Residence, a character complains, “People like a murder mystery! They think they’re fun!” After a beat, though, he can’t help but admit, “And it is fun.”
“Fun” is absolutely the watchword of this comic thriller, created by Paul William Davies and produced by Shonda Rhimes, which cross-pollinates Davies and Rhimes’ work on Scandal with the DNA of lots of classic whodunits, from Miss Marple all the way through to the Benoit Blanc/Knives Out trilogy. The Residence wears all of its influences on its sleeve: The episodes are named after famous movie mysteries like The Third Man and Dial M for Murder. Our intrepid sleuth gets to play the classic “I have one more question” card from Columbo. One suspect is even seen wielding a candlestick at a suspicious moment.
The detective at the center of all of this is Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba, joining her fellow Orange Is the New Black alum, Poker Face star Natasha Lyonne, with a foray into the mystery genre), a tweed-clad, bird-obsessed consulting detective who has, as she puts it without sounding like she’s bragging, “a reputation for solving unsolvable crimes.” The titular residence happens to be located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C. When the dead body of the White House’s head usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) is found during a state dinner with leaders of the Australian government, the head of the D.C. police (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) brings in Cupp, over the loud objections of presidential advisor Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), who doesn’t want a murder investigation anywhere near POTUS (Paul Fitzgerald).
It’s a high-stakes environment where the suspects have a wide range of motive and power, from Harry to temperamental pastry chef Didier Gotthard (Bronson Pinchot) to the president’s screwup kid brother Tripp (Jason Lee) to Wynter’s former lieutenant Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson). Australian pop icon Kylie Minogue plays herself, while there’s a running gag about another famous Aussie being in attendance but somehow always having their back turned to the camera. And comedian turned senator turned comedian Al Franken appears as … a senator, who, along with a political rival (Eliza Coupe), is trying to make sense of what happened during that long and complicated night in a hearing taking place months later.
That framing device is one of multiple ways that Davies and the other Residence writers play with time. We see Cupp and Edwin Park (Randall Park) — an FBI agent reluctantly pressed into service as Watson to Cupp’s Sherlock — interviewing various witnesses throughout the night, with the investigation seeming to present itself to us in random chronological order. But if it’s easy to lose track of exactly when and why everything is happening, it doesn’t matter all that much. The energy of the performances — from Aduba’s deadpan forthrightness to the more antic work by comedians like Marino and Jane Curtin (as the president’s grouchy mother-in-law) — and the rat-a-tat style of all the conversations carries the day. There’s also juuust enough genuine emotion inserted from time to time — much of it from Esposito(*), who appears often in flashbacks — to keep it feeling entirely like a trifle.
(*) Esposito was a last-second replacement for the late Andre Braugher, to whom the series is dedicated. It’s the second time in his career that Esposito has had to succeed Braugher, though the last time — when he joined the cast of Homicide: Life on the Street for that show’s final season after Braugher left — was under less sad circumstances.
And if the mystery occasionally becomes hard to follow, the resolution in the finale feels awfully satisfying, both in terms of who did it and how their guilt resonates with the series’ themes about the reasons — some noble, some narcissistic — people might choose to work at the White House. Though there are timelier-than-they-should-be jokes about abolishing education and buying Greenland, The Residence in many ways feels like a fantasy compared to what’s actually going on at 1600 Penn these days. It’s not just that the fictional president is married to another man (Barrett Foa), but that we’re given examples of at least some people who work and/or live at the most powerful address on Earth caring about something much bigger than themselves. Like a murder mystery itself — this delightful one in particular — that’s fun. Or, at least, it’s very welcome at the moment.
All eight episodes of The Residence are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole thing.
From Rolling Stone US
