TV: The Residence (2025)

A crack female detective ferrets out a cold killer in the White House

TV: The Residence (2025)

Streaming on Netflix

Raise your hand if you shudder these days as you read your newspaper’s Washington headlines. Could you use some relief getting down and dirty with a fun-packed White House?

I didn’t know how badly I needed that sort of breather until I watched this rollicking, expertly made comic murder mystery. To be sure, murder most foul takes place. But delectable wit and a hilarious hunt for clues kept me smiling across eight jam-packed episodes.

Consider the scene. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 132 rooms, some 200 potential suspects, laid out for us in meticulously detailed renderings of every room in the six-storey historic dwelling.

We’re familiar with the locked-room mystery. This is a locked-mansion whodunit. President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald) is hosting a state dinner for Australia. The two countries’ relations are strained, but in the State Dining Room the evening’s festivities are proceeding merrily.

Or so the president believes. He doesn’t know yet that the White House’s Chief Usher, AB Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), has been found dead on an upper floor.

The Chief Usher oversees every detail to keep the White House’s personal residence functioning, from supervising staff to selecting flower arrangements, and his death will unquestionably be front-page news.

And will call for an immediate public explanation. Wynter’s wrists have been cut, and panicked presidential advisor Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino) wants the ghastly discovery kept quiet until the morning.

Why disturb state-dinner revelers when the Chief Usher apparently took his own life? What reads like a suicide note is found beside his body.

If this were actual murder, Hollinger reasons, everyone, guests and staff, could be considered suspects. The two allied nations don’t need that hit.

But total lockdown is how it’s going to be, says “the world’s greatest detective”, Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), a special investigator called in by DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.

She demands the mansion be locked down, with no one permitted to leave. The president and Australia’s prime minister reluctantly agree. But they insist Cupp be paired with FBI agent Edwin Park (Randall Park) to hasten the investigation.

A confident Cupp and a perplexed FBI Agent Park team up to solve the puzzling homicide

Agent Park slowly grasps that Cupp may have it right: it could be that Chief Usher Wynter was murdered. That homicide scenario seems more than likely to MPD Chief Larry Dokes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.). The three now have to whittle down a suspect list of 157 guests and dozens of staff.

In flashback we learn that for all the respect Wynter commanded, his devotion to a tightly run institution provoked the ire of some of the staff.

That mix of workplace professionalism and festering unease sets all of Cupp’s investigative instincts humming. An avid birder who travels the world to sight the rarest specimens, she’s also become a meticulous observer of human foibles.

Which means that aside from the president, she doesn’t rule out anyone as a suspect, including the First Gentleman, Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa), who’s clashed with A.B. Yes, the president is gay, and, refreshingly, nothing whatever is made of it.

POTUS is served by a smart, dedicated but restive White House staff. Deputy Usher Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson) covets Wynter’s job and believes she has it in the bag, since he’s announced his retirement.

But on the day he’s found dead, he’d told her he’s changed his mind and won’t leave for at least a couple of years. Feeling betrayed, Haney can barely contain her fury. Is she mad enough to bump him off?

She’s not the only one growing weary of A.B. Sheila (Edwina Findley), another longtime usher, drinks to excess and giddily socializes and gossips with guests. When Wynter tires of her unprofessional conduct, she fears he’s about to fire her – which she menacingly tells others he couldn’t do “if he was no longer here”.

White House Chef Angie (Juliette Jeffers) is enraged that Wynter won’t let her serve more adventurous meals, growing so angry that in the staff's hearing, she threatens to kill him.

The pastry chef Didier (Bronson Pinchot) is profoundly angered when Wynter lets his beloved desserts be improperly presented while the gingerbread house he’s made for countless Christmases is consigned to the basement. To Wynter’s face, he brandishes a knife.

The president’s loony, jobless, alcoholic younger brother Tripp (Jason Morgan) defiantly cavorts through the mansion in bathrobe and slippers. When he moves paintings, busts, lamps and other precious objects to his room, Wynter threatens to inform the president, who’ll surely kick his feckless sibling out.

Cupp, with her cool, appraising gaze, never raising her voice, questions all of them, and they tellingly stutter, mumble and drop eye contact as she tricks and teases them into revealing their seething resentments.

We’re further informed by testimony from staff and other witnesses before a senatorial committee, chaired by Aaron Filkins (played in a nice comic turn by Al Franken, the former U.S. Senator).

Eventually, to get us the full story, Detective Cupp has the key White House figures resummoned to the White House, where she sets before them how the intricate facts of the case are weirdly interrelated, and who, therefore, the murderer has to be.

It’s a bravura sequence. Paul William Davies, who wrote all eight episodes, was inspired by a non-fiction book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower, to fashion the finely spun web of White House operations into his roiling script.

Production designer Francois Audony’s spectacular renderings are vivid and always clear in showing us how the grand house’s floors and rooms stand in relation to one another. The crack four-person editing team doesn't miss a beat in highlighting essential revelations.

I watched the series twice, and I was deeply impressed with how the hints, clues and red herrings fell into place. Directors Jaffer Mahmood and Liza Johnson keep the action flowing and the actors’ line readings fast, fluent and funny. With some poignant notes about public service nicely interwoven.

The magnet is Aduba as Cupp. Tweedily dressed, sharp in her questioning, able to pivot from clue to clue, she makes the dogged detective feel not just invincible but morally searching.

Cuff isn't just seeking truth, she’s fascinated to learn how flawed people can often rise to their best – or, as is bound to happen, sometimes let themselves and others down.

She’s as darting and clear-eyed as the falcons she studies admiringly through her binoculars as they circle the White House. I imagine Netflix believes she’s got more sleuthing to do.

Observing this unorthodox detective, Sherlock Holmes would surely agree that with Cordelia Cupp the game remains tantalizingly afoot.