A community as tight-knit and insular as the staff who keep the American White House running from day to day is ripe for some sort of comedic upstairs-downstairs treatment, a show, perhaps, that pokes fun at the idiosyncrasies involved in managing the president’s home base, and highlights the importance of all the anonymous staffers who work there.
The Residence, Netflix’s latest Shondaland effort, presents itself as just such a show: a murder mystery on the White House grounds that can only be solved by sorting out the intricate web of relationships between its enormous workforce, most of whom can’t stand each other. The result, unfortunately, is a lot less than the sum of its many, many parts.
The main problem with The Residence is that there’s too much of it. Its hour-long episodes (a crime for any comedy series) are stopped dead by flashbacks and flash-forwards that turn the very act of watching into a chore while you’re forced to parse where each scene exists in the timeline.
The show cuts constantly between the night of the murder—a state dinner for a delegation from Australia with a performance from THE Kylie Minogue—to flashbacks of the victim from days or even weeks prior, to present-day scenes where everyone involved is explaining the events we’ve just seen to a congressional hearing presided over by THE Al Franken.
Nothing about the plot warrants all this cross-cutting that mainly seems like an excuse to balloon the episodes out to much longer than they should be. It’s 2025 and we’re still complaining about “Netflix bloat.”
Much of the story revolves around consulting detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), a delightfully quirky, tweed-clad bird-watching enthusiast with “a reputation for solving unsolvable crimes” who seems flown in from a completely different (and better) show. She’s called in to investigate the mysterious death of Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), who is found with his wrists cut on the floor of one of the White House’s many color-coded rooms.
The Metropolitan Police Department and the F.B.I. are ready to rule it a suicide and call it a day, but Detective Cupp is much more interested in unraveling the relationships among all the other staffers, which involves talking to a rolodex of eccentric characters whose individual charms are overruled by the sheer number of actors featured. Those who aren’t completely invented are obvious half-conceived parodies of real people—the president’s grungy bathrobe-wearing failbrother Tripp (Jason Lee) is a clear Hunter Biden analog. The result is sometimes funny, often numbing.
There’s a clear streamlined structure to any mystery story that a meandering series like The Residence pointedly lacks. The show is adapted from a politely gossipy tell-all that does a simplified version of this very thing: former White House correspondent Kate Andersen Brower’s The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, an intimate record of decades of White House staff stories.
A sort of Downton Abbey for American politicians and their employees would have been a fine version of this, but adding a murder mystery just further complicates things. Even the jokes seem tired, every funny line delivered in the same exasperated tone, thanks to the kind of writing that thinks the height of comedic dialogue is: “First of all, no. And second of all, no!”
In an era of streaming where the majority of what gets released feels more nonessential by the year, The Residence seems conceived in a way to anxiously combat that phenomenon. People love murder mysteries, political intrigue, and comedies about class dynamics, so why not combine all three? It’s possible to make this, and make it good, but a must-watch version of The Residence would need to be shorter, sharper, and slicker. As it is, it feels like just another red herring.
