Cordelia Cupp is a modern Sherlock in this pacy whodunnit

Watching Orange is the New Black star Uzo Aduba navigate the eight staircases, three elevators and many doors of the White House makes The Residence all the more brilliant.

The Residence. Uzo Aduba nails the role of Cordelia Cupp in the Paul William Davies series The Residence. Picture: Jessica Brooks.

‘Growing up, I read the Sherlock Holmes canon, all 56 short stories, multiple times,” says writer Paul William Davies. “So, for me, it’s always Sherlock. But I love Poirot, and Miss Marple, and I love Knives Out. I really like those 70s all-star cast murder mysteries, like the Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express.”

He’s speaking of some of the influences on his brilliant series The Residence, the fictional story of the inner workings of the most famous house in the US, the White House. HBO’s hilarious, sometimes breathtaking, often outrageous murder mystery is a hoot.

Some episodes are even named for films that influenced this eclectic writer, such as Dial M for Murder, Knives Out and The Third Man, though one is titled The Adventures of the Engineer’s Thumb.

The body of the White House’s chief usher, A.B. Winter, played to uptight perfection by Giancarlo Esposito, the menacing, deadpan meth kingpin Gus Fring in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is found dead in the game room on the night of a tense state dinner for a group of unruly Australian diplomats. Is it a suicide or a murder? And could Kylie Minogue, the musical act for the dinner, possibly be involved? (The singer was bribed to perform by the promise of a night in the Lincoln bedroom.)

It falls on the world’s greatest detective, Cordelia Cupp, played by the outrageously talented Orange is the New Black star Uzo Aduba, to investigate the chief usher’s demise. What follows is an entertainingly farcical whodunit, a locked-door mystery with a possible 157 suspects, including those attending the dinner, the large gang of boisterous Australians.

Davies also cites Michael Frayn’s wonderful play, Noises Off, about the follies of theatre folk, in which the English writer takes a comedic look at the inner workings of theatre behind the scenes, as an influence. Davies’s characters are also susceptible to out-of-control egos, memory loss, flubbed lines, and missed cues. “There’s almost something farcical about the White House with all of the doors and people,” Davies says, not mentioning the 147 windows, eight staircases and three elevators, many of which feature in his story. “Noises Off was actually a big influence in thinking about the show because I love the theatricality of the White House, how there’s a backstage and an onstage, and we would see both of those things.”

As he suggests, there is more than a bit of performance to his version of the White House. “You go out into the state dinner, and you’re on stage there, and then you go back into the butler’s pantry or whatever, and people are fighting and doing shit and grabbing stuff, and then they go back out through the doors, and there’s misunderstandings.”

From left: Paul Fitzgerald as President Perry Morgan, Barrett Foa as Elliot Morgan, Kylie Minogue as herself, Ken Marino as Harry Hollinger, Dan Perrault as Colin Trask, Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp in The Residence.

The show is loosely based on the nonfiction book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by White House correspondent Kate Andersen Brower. Her account documented daily life in the Executive Mansion as lived through the stories, anecdotes, memories and reminiscences of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others who tend to the needs of the President and First Family. It ain’t always an easy job.

The rights were quickly picked up by Shondra Rhimes, the creative powerhouse behind Scandal and Bridgerton, along with Netflix, with Davies, who had written for and produced Scandal for Rhimes. Rhimes and Betsy Beers, a partner with Rhimes in her production company Shondaland, are the executive producers, with Liza Johnson directing the first four episodes. Johnson is a versatile director, with an experimental background, whose creative approach to narrative has enabled her to move effortlessly between dramatic series like The Last of Us, The Diplomat, What We Do in the Shadows and something as lateral as HBO’s offbeat comedy Barry. She needed all her skill to manage the creative aspects of this production, which at times is dizzyingly frantic, and to guide her actors through its dramatic convolutions. (It seems the show was often referred to by the cast as “upstairs, downstairs and backstairs” in the White House.) And Johnson has to deal with the multiple perspectives which work their way through numerous timelines in Davies’s script.

A measure of Davies’s skill is his ability to make human drama, and a great deal of humour, out of the process of Cupp’s inquiry without undercutting the power of the mystery that sets it all in motion. This is despite Cupp’s constant deviations into her obsession with bird watching. Cupp is especially excited by the birds the White House gardens offer to the compulsive
birder.

Giancarlo Esposito as A.B. Wynter in The Residence. Picture: Jessica Brooks.

For all the laughs in Davies’s script, and some inspired comic acting from a huge ensemble cast of experienced character actors, he ensures we remain desperate to know who killed the head usher – even across about eight hours of comic shenanigans with occasional diversions. “Part of the fun of a murder mystery is transparency and fairness, and you don’t want at the very end to learn, oh, there’s a twin that you never heard of, or there’s a lake just off camera,” Davies says.

A wonderful backstage farce, The Residence brims with slapstick comedy, complete with slamming doors, human confusion, layers of cross purposes, repeated actions, and offstage intrigue. There are witty elements of the classical detective genre structured around the puzzling inquiry and Davies gives us character and atmosphere alongside mystery.

We get the eccentric detective, the social comedy cast of characters, and a murder with its elaborate and ingenious problems of determining motive. (There’s also the delicious performance from Ms Minogue, a real trouper.)

Davies has a Christie-like ability in constructing a cast of characters and a situation that effectively dramatises the twists and turns of the classical detective structure. The plot is complicated and ingenious and never bogs down too long – though it gets close – in the interminable examination of clues and motives. Davies positively races through them, using staccato-like editing from one suspect to another, often using time jumps as well. There are constant touches of character and changing situations to dramatise Cupp’s process of inquiry.

Cupp must contend with a lot of motives, attitudes to A.B. Wynter constantly changing, and an overwhelming number of potential killers as she attempts to crack the case. But the investigation is also part of the most explosive congressional investigation since Watergate, which is also happening in the future and is intercut in the present with Cupp’s inquiries.

It all starts when A.B. Winter is found dead by the president’s mother-in-law, Nan (Jane Curtin), who spends the rest of the series calling out for vodka. The president’s chief adviser oleaginous Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino) wants the police, the FBI and all the other officials who gather to call his death a suicide given the cuts to Winter’s wrists. “Jesus,” sighs Cupp, “how many dudes do you need?”, as they crowd in claiming seniority.

Uzo Aduba in Orange is the New Black.

But Cupp is not convinced after examining the corpse with her trademark lengthy, penetrating, intent gaze. Then when she inspects the body she determines the shirt is not Wynter’s and there is blood on it inconsistent with the cuts on his wrist but there is also a possible suicide note in his jacket. Cupp decides to shut down the White House and question all the staff and the partygoers, followed by her reluctant sidekick, the rather dour FBI agent Edwin Park, played with wonderful forbearance by Randall Park.

The Residence is a delightful, sometimes breathless romp, despite a few longueurs along its somewhat frantic journey, and Davies and his many collaborators are generously determined to entertain us in these rather grim times.

The Residence is streaming on Netflix.