We absolutely love mysteries and whodunits, especially ones where a quirky, highly-intelligent detective has to wade through tons of evidence and question dozens of witnesses to find a killer in his or her midst. In a new comedic mystery miniseries from Shonda Rhimes, Uzo Aduba plays one of those detectives, called upon to investigate a suspicious death in, of all places, The White House.
Opening Shot: Busts and paintings of former presidents. It becomes apparent as the camera goes through different rooms and halls that we’re in The White House.
The Gist: White House head usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), who runs the residence portion of the presidential mansion, is walking through the entire building during a state dinner with the Australian prime minister, making sure everything is running smoothly. Suddenly, we see him in the game room, lying dead next to the pool table. Nan Cox (Jane Curtin), the mother of the president’s husband, screams after she found the body.
A few months later, there’s a Senate hearing to get the facts of the investigation into Wynter’s death out in public. The chairman of the committee, Senator Aaron Filkins (Al Franken), leads the questioning, starting with Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson); she was the assistant usher for 11 years and thought that Wynter was retiring, but found out that night he was staying. But the night he died, she got that promotion.
She talks about going up to the residence, and is told by the volatile Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), the president’s friend and closest advisor, and Colin Trask (Dan Perrault), the head Secret Service agent, to keep people out of the residence. Also on the scene is Larry Dokes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the chief of DC’s Metro Police, which annoys Harry to no end. “I wouldn’t even ask them to find my dick!” he rages. But this is MPD’s jurisdiction, and Dokes has brought in a consulting detective for this case: Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba).
Cupp is well known for solving some high-profile murders. She is certainly detail-oriented, and she’s a passionate birder, as Harry and company notice; she pauses in the gardens, looking around with binoculars, before she enters the house.
Cupp insists on doing the investigation her way, without the interference of all the “dudes” she sees outside the room where Whyte’s body is, including FBI Special Agent Edwin Park (Randall Park). This includes having Jasmine show her every one of the 132 rooms in the White House, and she wants to talk to everyone at the dinner, including the Aussie prime minister and Kylie Minogue (herself), who agreed to perform at the last minute. Harry insists that this was a suicide, but Cupp isn’t so sure.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the formats of the two shows are different, The Residence feels a lot like The Afterparty.
Our Take: The Residence is created by Paul William Davies, who worked on Scandal with his fellow executive producers, Shonda Rhimes and Betsey Beers. While the stuffed cast and rapid dialogue has all the hallmarks of a Shondaland production, Davies, who used a non-fiction book about the White House residence as inspiration for this story, puts his own spin on things. In essence, the show is a good old-fashioned whodunit with lots of suspects and a quirky detective. It’s that detective, and Uzo Aduba’s performance, that is going to keep us watching.
All of the characters that surround Cordelia Cupp are more or less your standard whodunit tropes, from characters like Harry that try their best to undermine the detective, to ones like Jasmine, who want to help but have secrets. Everyone else only get a few lines to distinguish themselves, and some get better lines than others. In the first episode, for instance, both Perrault as the Minogue-loving Secret Service agent and Curtin as Nan Cox get that treatment. So does Eliza Coupe as Margery Bay Bix, a loud, brash senator on the investigative committee who keeps interrupting Filkins’ questioning with exclamations of incredulousness.
While all of these characters — and the seemingly dozens of others — will have their moments during this limited series, we’re here to watch Aduba. She inhabits Cordelia in the same way Peter Falk inhabited Columbo, Tony Shalhoub inhabited Adrian Monk, and Daniel Craig (mentioned in the first episode) inhabited Benoit Blanc in Knives Out. Cordelia is obsessed with birds and how they differ in behavior from humans, and finds details that it seems that even seasoned law enforcement officials can’t.
She does this through supreme confidence in her abilities and the way she goes about doing her job. She’s not intimidated by people like Harry and is brutally honest with President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald) about the idea that all of the 140-something guests are suspects until she can eliminate them. Oh, and she hates the idea that all of these “dudes” around her are trying to tell her what to do. The only one that isn’t is Edwin, the FBI agent that’s been assigned to tail her, but we can imagine that it will take her some time to trust him. Even so, both Watson and Randall Park are good foils for Aduba as the three of them go through this investigation.
We’re not huge fans of the congressional committee conceit, even if it lets us see Franken (who’s isn’t exactly stretching here to play a U.S. Senator, given that he was one in real life) and Coupe square off. But it does serve to give us the multiple perspectives that have been a hallmark of whodunits like this in recent years. It also makes us wonder why there is a committee if Cupp spent the entire night investigating Whyte’s death and supposedly finding out who did it.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After Cordelia makes an observation that leads the president to lock down the White House so she can investigate, we see an overview of the rooms that make up the very complex ecosystem of the presidential mansion.
Sleeper Star: Here’s a good place to mention some of the other guest stars: Jason Lee as Tripp Morgan, the president’s fairly lazy brother; Molly Griggs as Lilly Schumacher, the president’s social secretary; Bronson Pinchot as the White House’s pastry chef; Edwina Findley as a butler; Julian McMahon as Stephen Roos, the Australian prime minister and about two dozen others we don’t have room to mention.
Most Pilot-y Line: We found it interesting that in the world that Davies writes, the president is in a same-sex marriage. While we hope that one day something like that comes to pass, it feels like wish fulfillment on Davies’ part, given where we are politically right now.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While not hilarious, The Residence has funny moments. Paired with Uzo Aduba’s mesmerizing performance as Cordelia Cupp, the show is very watchable.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.