Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: White House-set whodunnit The Residence.
The Residence, Netflix’s new murder mystery series, is full of conspiracies. We’re mid-Kylie Minogue performance – don’t worry, the role of Kylie Minogue is played by Kylie Minogue – at a presidential dinner held for the Australian prime minister (Julian McMahon) at the White House, and there’s a dead guy (Giancarlo Esposito) in the third-floor game room of the first family’s private residence. There are 157 possible suspects.
Any and every motive is at play, from political assassination to political rivalry, and every missing object, lustful secret, and white lie could provide the ultimate solution. But allow me to propose my own theory. The Residence, while overseen by Bridgerton tsarina Shonda Rhimes, and created by Paul William Davies, is in fact an elaborately constructed ruse to subconsciously implant the idea that the (now Netflix-owned) Knives Out films are canon classics.
Lay down the torches for a moment! They’re both excellent, and The Residence could only ever dream of finding a way to make “Jeremy Renner’s small-batch hot sauce” a pivotal plot mechanism – it’s just a little curious, you might say, that the murder mystery franchise Netflix paid over $400m to acquire is referenced multiple times across the series’ eight episodes.
It’s not only the title of episode three, with the rest of the episodes named after established classics like The Third Man and Dial M for Murder, but, when the show’s in-house detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) turns up, somebody drops a reference to “whoever Daniel Craig is in that fucking movie”. Even her tweed-heavy academic getup, you could argue, has a whiff of Benoit Blanc to it.
Yet, what Knives Out owes implicitly to Agatha Christie or The Last of Sheila, The Residence would rather point out explicitly. It’s happy to borrow a few bars of Henry Mancini’s score for 1963’s Charade or turn 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into a giant Cluedo board, with its colour-coded rooms (the Red Room, the Blue Room etc) captured in zippy, overhead shots. At points, the entire place is cleaved in two like a dollhouse. Somebody wields a candelabra.
All these references are fun, and there’s a lightness of touch that allows its sillier gags to land with grace (I particularly enjoyed a running bit about what a “bad night on the job” might look like for a professional calligrapher). But, for a story that explicitly frames itself as being about the clash between old and new orders, about the chaos caused by an outgoing presidency and an incoming one for a household established on habit and tradition – what exactly is the “new” that The Residence intends to bring to the table?
You could say this is a murder mystery with a tongue fluent in pop culture (we’ll ignore the fact Knives Out already has that covered). Only, the insistence on having Hugh Jackman “appear” in scenes without the actor actually starring in the show is deeply annoying.
And, despite The Residence being set at the very heart of American politics, its vision of an openly married gay president overseeing an administration actually committed to the idea of justice is so detached from our current reality that when it talks about the need for unity, its words feel both fantastical and deeply naive. The fact the only connection to real-world politics is the presence of Al Franken, the former senator who resigned in 2018 following sexual misconduct allegations, only deepens that sense of total disconnect.
What The Residence can offer, at least, is Aduba’s performance. On paper, Cordelia is the roughest sketch of a genius detective. She has a superhuman eye for detail and two mandated eccentricities: a love of birdwatching and tinned sardines. But Aduba doesn’t take the lazy route. Cordelia isn’t a collection of ticks, a vague imitation of Craig’s Benoit Blanc or Peter Falk’s Columbo, but someone who’s simple, confident, and direct.
She receives information with a cocked eyebrow and a smirk. And she expresses her intelligence with her hands buried in her pockets, as if the situation were about as interesting to her as ordering a cheeseburger. The Residence may be a covert propaganda piece for Knives Out, but don’t underestimate Cordelia Cupp.
