In ‘The Residence,’ Uzo Aduba investigates a death in the White House
Netflix’s “The Residence” ushers the Shondaland empire back to the White House with a broad, escapist twist. Whereas “Scandal” was a drama about a fixer, this limited series, created by “Scandal” writer and producer Paul William Davies, is a hammy whodunit starring Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp, the world’s greatest detective (and an inveterate birder).
The show’s world is implausible, well-rendered and surprisingly specific. This is an alternate universe where the president (Paul Fitzgerald) is gay, married and trying to save the United States’ shaky relationship with Australia — and his fledgling administration — with a fancy state dinner. It’s not a home run. The seating chart’s a mess, the White House calligrapher is off his game and the food is as meager as it is bewildering. But things really go south when White House chief usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) — the man in charge of forging the permanent White House staff and the new president’s employees into a functional team — is found dead in the Game Room on the third floor, his body riddled with a comical number of potential causes of death.
Spiritually akin to “Clue” and especially “Knives Out,” to which it explicitly refers (Daniel Craig’s character, Benoit Blanc, gets a shoutout), “The Residence” is less original than winsomely derivative. The series is packed with references to other mysteries (and other White House shows, with the first episode featuring more than one time-lapse sequence in which shadows pass dramatically over federal buildings, a la “House of Cards”). Episodes are named after famous murder mysteries (“Dial M for Murder,” “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”). There is a dog that didn’t bark (until he did), and one character is shown reading Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” These allusions tend to be more amusing than substantive; the first episode, in which the chief usher dies, is titled “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Even the casting is laced with winks and nods. The president’s friend and chief adviser, Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), for instance, is obsessed with getting the death ruled a suicide so as to minimize the political fallout. Hollinger isn’t especially similar to Marino’s “Party Down” character, Ron Donald, the catering crew’s hapless boss. But it’s pretty fun — and feels deliberate — that we first encounter him sweatily managing the fallout of a disastrous party.
Esposito has enormous range, but his Wynter has more than a hint of his famous “Breaking Bad” character, Gus Fring, who managed his employees with poise and sangfroid. Al Franken plays a slightly slimy senator. Bronson Pinchot, who played the heavily accented Balki in “Perfect Strangers” and Serge in “Beverly Hills Cop” despite being American (and a prolific and gifted audiobook narrator), plays a haughty Swiss-German pastry chef.
It’s a pleasure to watch “The Wire” alums Edwina Findley and Isiah Whitlock Jr. work in a goofier register. And Randall Park — who becomes Cupp’s sidekick, Edwin Park, throughout the investigation — leans into his stint as Jimmy Woo in the Marvel universe: He is once again an FBI agent. The show’s silliest casting joke concerns Hugh Jackman, but I won’t spoil it.
The exception to all this is Aduba, who carries the series, and whose character couldn’t differ more from the one she’s most famous for (Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in “Orange Is the New Black”). Aduba plays Cupp as fantastically dry, literal and thoroughly dismissive of the president’s diplomatic and political concerns. It’s a delightful performance I’ve found myself rewatching just for fun.
Cupp effectively has two assistants: Park, whose presence she merely tolerates, and Susan Kelechi Watson’s Jasmine Haney, the White House assistant usher, who escorts her through the building and carefully explains how the White House runs. Both are great, but Park makes a particularly funny Watson to Aduba’s Holmes. (It’s usual for the sidekick to narrate the detective’s unorthodox methods; “The Residence” does this via a Senate hearing about the events that took place on the night of the state dinner. That framing device — effectively an investigation of an investigation — gives Park many amusing opportunities to narrate Cupp’s unorthodox approach to sleuthing.)
I can’t speak to whether “The Residence” works as an actual whodunit; critics received only seven of the series’ eight episodes. (There’s at least one discrepancy — possibly a plot hole, unless the conclusion explains it — concerning the length of one person’s employment.) But it excels at delivering the genre’s more incidental pleasures, which are the real reason so many of us watch or read.
“The Residence” is really a cheeky and salacious anthropology of the White House inspired by, and even borrowing a number of real historical anecdotes from, Kate Andersen Brower’s “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.” It’s an upstairs/downstairs extravaganza about staff rivalries and resentments. And a fun way to think about how the permanent staff of the White House might feel about the building’s many temporary occupants. Haney describes the dynamic to Cupp as “us vs. them,” with “us” encompassing the permanent staff and “them” meaning everyone from the president to his staff to the media to the guests.
Aduba plays Cupp with a stillness that shouldn’t be half as charming or entertaining as it is. Her character’s reserve (and many bird-watching breaks) anchors the show and makes space for the loud and silly performances “The Residence” specializes in, such as Jane Curtin’s turn as Nan Cox, the president’s soused mother-in-law, and Jason Lee’s stint as Tripp Morgan, his drunken loser of a brother. Edwina Findley steals scene after scene as Sheila Cannon, a festive, boundary-stomping White House butler. Molly Griggs plays a two-faced social secretary, Eliza Coupe twinkles demonically as a scandalmongering, conspiracy-minded senator, and Mary Wiseman makes a meal of every scene she has as Marvella, the White House’s irascible executive chef.
With wild monologues stacking up as conflict after conflict unspools, it’s hard to stay focused on the murder, or to invest overmuch in the solution. The show’s most compelling intervention, seven episodes in, might be how carefully it makes the case that cases can’t be solved. This is a screwball mystery. Its one concession to realism is that witnesses tell bafflingly different and incompatible versions of the same story — and not always because they’re lying.
I can’t say what the show hopes to achieve by introducing that degree of uncertainty into a whodunit; by the end, besides an abundance of motives and clues, there are too many inconsistencies for a lazy viewer to track. (I have no idea who did it but found myself wondering, watching Christie’s “Roger Ackroyd” make the aforementioned appearance, whether “Murder on the Orient Express” might be the more pertinent text.) But regardless of where it all ends up, watching Cupp working through her leads — and getting folks to fess up to lesser crimes while nattering darkly about birds — makes for a pretty good time.
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“The Residence”
Streaming now on Netflix