While I do love a clever murder mystery, I can’t say that I watch a lot of them. I grew up in the 80s with the likes of Remington Steel, Murder She Wrote, and Moonlighting, where solving a mysterious murder was a fun way to spend an evening each week. Now victims seem to die in bleak, remote communities where psychologically-damaged detectives bring their emotional baggage along to help them catch a deeply-disturbed killer. More recently, shows like Only Murders in the Building, and the Knives Out films have set up the right conditions for shows like The Residence, where eccentric, bird-watching detective Cordelia Cupp (played by Uzi Aduba) investigates the murder of the chief usher (i.e. the person who manages the “house” side) of the White House (played by Giancarlo Esposito) on the night of a state dinner. There is an enjoyably huge cast of characters, who mostly play White House staff and guests, who all, naturally, have motives for the crime.

Off the bat, Cupp is a wonderfully fresh and unique character who is famous for solving unsolvable cases. When they bring her in, she gets right down to observing the smallest clues, interviewing the suspects (where she employs a highly effective method of silently pausing until the other person squirms nervously and starts spilling their guts just to break the silence). Aduba’s performance is great. She plays Cupp with unflappable confidence and intelligence and there is absolutely zero doubt that Cupp’s got everything sorted out in her brain and that she’ll piece it all together. Like most smart, fictional detectives she has a Holmesian eye for detail and skills of deduction. Ironically it’s so fun to watch her go through the investigation and the analysis that it hardly matters who the actual killer is by the end. 

Paul William Davies, who cut his teeth on previous Shonda Rhimes series Scandal, does a masterful job creating and writing this show. The scripts and dialogue are quick and sharp. Even the way scenes are put together — jumping smoothly from character to character in a flow of words; cutting back and forth between locations and even timeframes — are very fun. The rapid-fire blending seems to reflect the way thoughts and ideas flip around in our minds. The script is also flavoured with a nice dry humour which keeps the whole tone light, despite the reasonably serious context. It’s just really enjoyable to watch scene after scene play out. Normally we also tend to look for plot twists (and this series definitely has a few) but it’s way more than the gotcha moments that make this show a delight. The episodes don’t play out in straight chronological sequence, either, and between flashbacks we also get those scenes (that I love in a mystery) where we see events from another perspective based on different witnesses’ accounts. And in the “present”, there’s even a senate hearing (of course there is) where the characters are giving testimony about the events of that evening. It’s like the script equivalent of a Rubik’s Cube (but one that you believe you might be able to solve on your own — though you probably won’t).

As mentioned, the cast is very large for a story that happens in one location, and mostly within a single evening. There are many familiar and beloved faces, including Esposito, Ken Marino, Randall Park, This Is Us’s Susan Kelechi Watson, Jason Lee, Julian McMahon, Bronson Pinchot, Jane Curtin, Star Trek Discovery’s Mary Wiseman, Saturday Night Live vet Al Franken, Eliza Coupe, and even Australian singer/actress Kylie Minogue as herself. (If you don’t recognize some of those names offhand, you’ll certainly know them when you see them. )The cast includes a broad range of characters who run the gamut, including a Swiss pastry chef who likes to make candy miniatures; a fiery free-spirited chef who used to run a food truck; an old vodka-loving lady who resents her son-in-law, i.e. the president; a secret service agent who fawns a bit too much over celebs like Minogue and Hugh Jackman; and a stacked “Clue” deck of many colourful folk with interconnected and elaborate backstories who all make delicious suspects.

From start to finish, this series is engaging and addictive. Netflix would be happy to hear that I binge-watched most of it in a couple of days (since they love to put out all episodes of a season in one or two blocks). Again, if you liked Knives Out or Glass Onion, this will be right up your alley, plus there’s eight episodes so there’s more to love. I don’t know if there’s going to be a second season as they’d have to find another situation as intriguing as a murder in the White House (and they’d probably have to rename the show) but if Cordelia Cupp is back for another (un)solvable case, I am here for it too. (5 out of 5)