4 out of 5

Created by: Paul William Davies

A couple episodes over the mark, almost entirely due to excessively quirky edits of repetitive beats, The Residence – an eight episode Clue-like whodunnit, taking place in the White House – manages to easily overcome those stumbling blocks by being a solid whodunnit, that stays truer to its tagline – “132 rooms. 157 suspects. 1 dead body.” – and genre indulgences over anything else. With the year of The Residence’s release having been generally deemed a peak era of second screen TV, during which attentions are at least always halved by another device scrolling or tweeting while your movie / TV show streams in the background, requiring said background viewing to make the story very, very, very clear at all times just in case i think you missed it let me say it again… while the show does kowtow to this, mostly via the above-mentioned hiccups, it also rolls out details and jokes at such a constant clip that the buffering feels acceptable, and adds a lot of enjoyable character work (via a huge cast!) to fill additional downtime. Are some folks trying to hard to chew the scenery? Sure. Do some beats misfire, or over- or under- fire? Absolutely. Were the overt (at the time) current political nods necessary? Probably not, given the ultimately general themes. But all of this went into a stew that was ultimately being stirred by the well-intentioned hands of writer / creator Paul William Davies, and man, you know, maybe I’m questioning some of those stew ingredients – but the end product made me want more.

After a fashion, we’ll get to detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), who – in one of the series’ many overly-referential bits – is likened to Benoit Blanc from Knives Out, with whom Cordelia certainly shares a baseline of eccentricity, as The Residence basks in that film’s Agatha Christie-nibbing, constant dekeing, and many-suspects charms. Cupp constantly remarks on how many “dudes” there are, fussing about this particular case, constantly shuts down seemingly sincere help from FBI agent Edwin (Randall Park), treats everyone otherwise as equally untrustworthy, and saunters from room to room of the residential quarters of The White House (aka ‘the residence’), unvocally noting clues as a careful camera looks this way and that, but doesn’t necessarily connect the pieces for us until our bucket of red herring and quirk has been filled and Cordelia quickly explains how she’s deduced what she’s deduced, bringing us to the next link in a pretty long chain. On the huge plus side, none of the links end up feeling superfluous, and Cupp is not one to withhold information for a reveal; she remains quiet to observe, and then speaks up – mostly pointedly, except for framing things in terms of birding, her preferred eccentricity – once she’s drawn a conclusion. On the minimally irksome side are the editing cutaways to other characters and flavorful flashbacks, the former used ad nauseam to hit joke punctuations again and again, and the latter used not without relevance, but also clearly sometimes just to get us away from seeing the same rooms and primary characters, when we have such a huge call list of character actors, waiting for exactly their 10-minutes of episode focus to shine.

Those are the spinning plates: the mystery, a wobbly plate of tone, and one plate that has to be swapped out for a new one periodically – our rotating suspect focus. The Residence sincerely keeps them all going, pretty damn well, risking second screen viewing habits with an almost old school radio method of mile-a-minute dialogue and puzzle-solving storytelling that will eventually explain itself, but is also pleasingly content with drawing the audience along and not shoving them. Directors Liza Johnson and Jaffar Mahmood (and a small team of editors) blend this with youtube / tik-tok baiting edits, providing some lizard brain satisfaction of potential memey quips and short-attention-span cuts. Yeah, I’ve quipped a few times about that, but it’s a balance I’m willing to accept, if we’re sneaking in quality stories in the meantime.

During a state dinner hosting the Australian Foreign Minister, the White House’s chief usher (Giancarlo Esposito) – head of household staff – is found dead. His assistant, Jasmine (Susan Kelechi Watson) tries to keep word of this quiet while various authorities bicker over what to do next and who has jurisdiction to do so, but the cops have called in Cupp, and so we begin. …But not before flashing back to when Jasmine had an argument with the chief usher (suspect #1!) and also not before flashing forward to the congressional hearing after the murder, which gives us a clever way to kind of recap and discover at the same time.

Likely a few minutes in to the hand drawn title sequence, the constant jazzy score from Mark Mothersbaugh, and the fast-flying chatter and heavy hits on punchlines, you’ll know: am I annoyed? or am I digging this?

Definitely check out if you’re in the former camp, as it ain’t gonna change. If you’re the latter – prepare to be surprised how the positive qualities with which the show kicks off never wane.