In episode one of The Residence, detective Cordelia Cupp watches some of the most important men in Washington DC arguing over who has jurisdiction to investigate a death in the White House. She wonders aloud how many dudes it takes to get things done. Cupp’s frustration is palpable. Ask people to name famous fictional detectives and they’ll probably rattle off the greats like Holmes, Poirot, Columbo, Blanc, or Clouseau – all very male and all very white.
Make them list female detectives and they might mention Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, or Nancy Drew (more modern viewers might mention Elspeth Tascioni). Better, but still an exclusively white club. Detective Cupp might be the answer to this. Created by Paul William Davies and produced by Shondaland, Netflix’s The Residence’s gives us something new: a black, female, neurodivergent detective with a flair for birding and canned mackerel. Yet Cupp is probably the only truly original thing the series offers.
I say this not to be critical or dismissive of The Residence. It tries. It really does. But derivation seems to be the name of the game for this murder-mystery (and very occasionally) comedy series. The entire show is set up to be a self-reflexive, tongue-in-cheek homage to the detective genre. The Residence puts a lot of energy and noise into being inventive and interesting, but does it succeed? It took me all eight episodes to find out.
When AB Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), the White House chief usher, is found dead during a state dinner, Detective Cupp (Uzo Aduba) is summoned. Aduba has gone from Crazy Eyes to the “world’s most famous detective” with plenty of attitude. She’s got an overflowing cup to manage here. The White House has 132 rooms and 157 staff – all with personal axes to grind. Add passive-aggressive Australians and the intricacies, inefficiencies, and conspiracies of DC’s political machinery, and no wonder Cupp gets distracted staring at birds (not a euphemism).
In style and aesthetics, the series has a Wes Andersen vibrancy. There is whimsy aplenty, eye-popping colours, droll humour, and fanciful insights into the absurdity of the ordinary. There’s a real love for miniaturisation and metafiction – the White House is rendered a model house through which the camera roves from room to room, peeping at people and plots. Nestled in the White House is a replica gingerbread White House, complete with furniture, staff, and backstabbed usher.
Other things nestle, too, including secrets and stories. Cupp holds interviews with the people in the house to learn their identities, connections and motives. There are maniacal chefs, egomaniacal in-laws, hysterical butlers, and three Georges. Later, many of these people are interviewed by Congress about being investigated by Cupp. These interviews are fun, high-energy, and absurd. You might have heard of the unreliable narrator; here we have the unreliable witness – 157 of them.
This is where the series shines. The interview sessions playfully experiment with film techniques like smash-cut editing and transposed sounds and dialogue. Combined, they form a crazy collage of voices and viewpoints that rarely tally and cause more conflict when they do. Everyone in the White House has something to say about everyone else. Memory and history are slippery and only as true as remembered. And there isn’t one unified truth, but 157 versions to untangle.
While these editing techniques are fun and helpful, the excessive overreliance on them is overkill. It’s actually obnoxious how little the show trusts its audience’s capacity to follow. Even within the same episode, information is repeated ad nauseum, sometimes right after it’s said. There’s only so many ways you can bludgeon the viewer over the head. After being assaulted by the same clip of chef Marvella screaming “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” for the dozenth time, I actually wished she would.
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch said: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere… And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it.” The Residence takes this artistic advice to heart. It celebrates the detective genre by being deliriously self-reflexive and intertextual, openly and liberally pinching references from more famous mysteries. Yet underneath the exuberance for candlesticks, libraries, and Agatha Christie geek-out sessions, the series remains bland, less than the sum of its awesome cast or grand intentions. And I can’t say Cordelia Cupp, who ticks all the political boxes, is joining the big table for detectives. In fact, there’s a good chance of people confusing this show with Fox’s The Resident.
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