The Residence Review: Netflix's Mystery Comedy Is Clue at the White House

A game of Clue at the White House. It's such a simple, perfect idea that it's a surprise it took this long for someone to do it. And The Residence, Netflix's new murder mystery comedy, executes the idea very well. It's a fun mystery with a skilled cast and excellent production design. As a murder mystery, it's not doing much you haven't seen before in the rule-bound genre, and have in fact seen very recently and will soon see again, in the form of the Knives Out movies. But it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, and that is always something to be admired. 

The Residence is a locked room mystery — where a crime is committed and all the suspects stay on premises while the investigator gathers clues — set in the Executive Residence at the White House. A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), the White House chief usher, who oversees the entire domestic staff, is found dead during a state dinner. His body is staged to look like a suicide, but it's very suspicious. Due to the sensitivity of the situation, the world's greatest detective, Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), who consults for the Metropolitan Police Department, is brought in to investigate, and she finds many suspects who had reason to want Wynter dead. As she tries to figure out whodunit, she has to deal with many eccentric characters — which she is herself — and all of their interpersonal conflicts with other employees and residents. Many of these people are trying to impede her investigation, and all of them are hiding something. 

ALSO READ: The complete guide to spring TV

The series comes from Shondaland, Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers' production company, which also makes Bridgerton, Grey's Anatomy, and many other hit shows, and is created by Paul William Davies, a Shondaland veteran who previously created the ABC legal drama For the People. Davies writes every episode here, Mike White of The White Lotus-style. He was inspired by the nonfiction book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower, which gives an inside look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as told by the people who work there. A few years ago, this would have been a straightforward workplace drama, Grey's Anatomy at the White House. But in the White Lotus era of TV, there needs to be a dead body before the opening credits in an effort to hook audiences. So Davies combines the White House upstairs-downstairs angle with a classic Agatha Christie-influenced murder mystery. 

7.7

The Residence

at Netflix

Like

• Lots of fun
• Slam-dunk premise
• Exceptional production design

Dislike

• Follows the formula a little too closely
• A bit bloated

The White Lotus is a clear influence, not in the show's storytelling or themes, but in its construction. If The Residence comes back for Season 2, it's set up to have a different cast around Aduba, similar to how The White Lotus has a revolving cast. (The Residence actually has more in common with how Knives Out does it, but we'll get more into that later.) The shows share a casting director in Meredith Tucker, who is extraordinarily adept at finding the right actors for parts, whether they're famous or not. 

The Residence's cast is stocked with recognizable veterans playing to their strengths. Ken Marino is a standout as Harry Hollinger, the president's best friend and chief advisor, doing a version of Ron Donald, his agitated, motormouthed caterer from Party Down. SNL legend Jane Curtin steals scenes as the president's drunken, judgmental mother-in-law. And My Name Is Earl's Jason Lee, in his biggest role in more than a decade, finds unexpected pathos in the role of the president's screw-up brother, Tripp. (All three of these characters live in the White House, which is the show's silliest conceit.) It's great to see Lee again, and hopefully this presages a comeback after he spent the past decade away from Hollywood. And these are just a few standouts in a cast that also includes Randall Park, Bronson Pinchot, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Kylie Minogue as herself. Esposito's role was originally meant to be played by the late Andre Braugher. The role feels tailor made for Braugher's signature fastidiousness, and his presence is missed here and everywhere else on TV, but Esposito brings his own fastidiousness and reserved warmth to Wynter, who is seen in flashbacks.

There are lesser-known but equally well-cast members of the troupe as well, such as Molly Griggs as the president's influencer-brained social secretary, Lilly Schumacher, and American Vandal co-creator Dan Perrault as Colin Trask, the president's pop culture-obsessed lead Secret Service agent. There are so many characters that sometimes it feels like there's not enough room for all of them, but for the most part the show is well balanced in terms of how much time it spends with the supporting cast. 

It all revolves around Uzo Aduba's Cordelia Cupp, though. A murder mystery needs an entertaining detective to hold it all together, and Aduba is up to the task. Cupp is a very fun riff on the Sherlock Holmes figure. She's obsessed with birdwatching. She'll often stop what she's doing to look for birds on the White House grounds, and will just as often give clever little lectures about lessons she learns from birds about how to be a detective. Not everything about the character works — a digression into her personal life could have been left on the cutting room floor; this is the kind of larger-than-life character who doesn't need a humanizing backstory — but Aduba brings an arch intelligence to the role that makes her a pleasure to watch. 

Cupp is Netflix's second "World's Greatest Detective," after Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc, and The Residence is up-front about what it owes to the Knives Out franchise. The third episode, which follows Pinchot's pastry chef Didier Gotthard, is amusingly titled "Knives Out." All of the episode titles are homages to classic mysteries, and Knives Out is the most timely one. The Residence draws on Knives Out's Clue-board formula and adapts it for television. The Knives Out movies have the advantage of not having to draw out the story over the course of an eight-episode season, though, and The Residence suffers from a little bit of the midseason bloat that many streaming series do. Some scenes and storylines could have been tightened up.

Speaking of Clue boards, production designer François Audouy built a spectacular real-life one for the White House set. According to Netflix, The Residence's set is the most extensive White House set ever built, and the production gets its money's worth running up and down the stairs and into lesser-known rooms in America's most famous house. The White House has so many distinct rooms with easily understandable characters in them that it lends itself perfectly to the Clue format, like "It was the Secret Service agent in the solarium with the bust of Teddy Roosevelt." (That's not a spoiler, just a hypothetical example.) And it gets turned into a game board via dollhouse shots where the camera floats from room to room, giving a bird's eye view or cross section view of the house. It's very technically impressive, and even more impressive for how well integrated it is to the storytelling. 

Politics are not integrated. They're actually pretty much avoided, in a way that makes narrative sense. As Wynter makes a point of stressing in the show, the White House's staff serve the house, not its occupant. Employees are not political appointees, and their tenures span multiple administrations. But the show is nevertheless unavoidably Dem-coded, as the Democrats are the party that represents reverence for government institutions. And the show has a frame device of a Senate hearing about getting to the bottom of what happened the night Wynter died — there's a double-flashback structure, from the hearing to the night of and then to what happened before — that features Eliza Coupe as a conspiratorial firebrand unsubtly named Margery Bay Bix and comedian and former Democratic senator Al Franken parodying himself as Sen. Aaron Filkens. If you want to be in on the joke of these characters, it helps to be a Democrat. Like another recent Netflix show, the politically institutionalist thriller Zero Day, The Residence is a show that seems like it would have found a better cultural fit if Joe Biden had been reelected. But, again, the White House is definitionally nonpartisan, and The Residence does not have a political agenda beyond respecting the office. It uses the White House as a grand stage for a screwball mystery. Season 2 could be set at a different iconic location, and it would have a similar effect. 

The Residence is not groundbreaking or flawless or thematically rich, but it is entertainment executed at a very high level. It's funny and engaging, and its technical craft is impressive. Between The Residence, Only Murders in the Building, and Poker Face, American TV murder mysteries are in the strongest place they've been since the heyday of Murder, She Wrote.

Premieres: All episodes premiere Thursday, March 20 on Netflix
Who's in it: Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito, Randall Park, Susan Kelechi Watson, Jason Lee
Who's behind it: Paul William Davies (creator/showrunner), Shonda Rhimes (executive producer)
For fans of: Murder mysteries, The White House
How many episodes we watched: 7 of 8