At a certain point, we have to start feeling bad for the last five famous actors who have not yet appeared on a lighthearted streaming murder show. They didn’t get to be the detective, or the murderer, or the one with the biggest secret, but not even being cast as themselves in a winky, self-aware cameo? Yeesh.
As with many current show in its pitch and timbre, “The Residence” is a conveyor belt of famous faces, including Uzo Aduba, Eliza Coupe, Jane Curtin, Giancarlo Esposito, Al Franken, Taran Killam, Jason Lee, Ken Marino, Randall Park, Bronson Pinchot, Susan Kelechi Watson and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Kylie Minogue makes a winky, self-aware cameo as herself.) It is certainly one way to thwart viewers’ “Law and Order”-honed skill of identifying the famous guest star as the central criminal.
“The Residence,” on Netflix, is a boppy little murder mystery set in the White House. Paul William Davies is the show’s creator and the writer of every episode, with Davies, Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers as executive producers; it is based on the nonfiction book “The Residence,” by Kate Andersen Brower.
Davies’s previous work includes “Scandal,” and the shows share a similar vague relationship to presidential history, but there is no screen-melting romance here. “The Residence” does not have the sizzle or sudsiness of other Shondaland titles, nor is it particularly provocative; its big innovation is that the president (Paul Fitzgerald) is a white gay man who lives in the White House with his husband (Barrett Foa), brother (Lee) and mother-in-law (Curtin).
That’s not to say it isn’t fun. It is, with ample Agatha Christie references, a whooshing momentum and plenty of intrigue.
It’s the night of a chaotic state dinner, and the White House chief usher, A.B. Wynter (Esposito), turns up dead. (Andre Braugher, who died in December, was originally cast in the role.) Everyone’s a suspect: the guests, the staff, the first family. This calls for a genius investigator, and not just any genius. A quirky genius! Enter Cordelia Cupp (Aduba), an avid birder and obsessive observer of details. The game is afoot.
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