The Residence (TV Program)

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    ‘The Residence’ Review: Murder and Mystery in the White House

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    The Netflix series, executive produced by Shonda Rimes, is the latest lighthearted murder mystery on streaming TV.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sudden Weirdness of TV Presidents

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      Today’s political dramas have conspiracy, murder and supervolcanoes. But their conventional White House protocols and procedures might be the most disorienting aspects.You can’t say that TV’s fictional presidencies lack for drama today.In “Zero Day,” the former President George Mullen (Robert DeNiro) sleuths out the source of a debilitating cyberattack. In “Paradise,” the feckless nepo baby President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) shoulders responsibility for humankind after an extinction-level volcanic eruption (and, no spoiler, gets murdered in his postapocalyptic underground shelter). In “The Residence,” a White House state dinner becomes a crime scene.Yet watching these political series lately, I am now struck by the same nagging feeling. This is all wrong, I think. It feels too normal — even the series that takes place in an enormous subterranean city.It’s not just that TV dramas can’t compete with the show we’re watching unfold on the news. Increasingly, they seem to operate in a parallel universe.Historically, TV’s presidents — Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing,” David Palmer on “24,” Fitzgerald Grant on “Scandal” — tend to share certain familiar traits. They are concerned with the appearance of stability and normalcy. They treat federal enforcement and intelligence agencies as part of a system to manage, not as internal enemies to be conquered. They make measured statements. They scold, even explode, but behind closed doors. They even have an aesthetic: a cool formality that speaks of quiet power without ostentation.Compare them with our reality. President Trump erupts into a shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a nominal ally, in front of live cameras, ending the altercation by saying, “This is going to be great television.” He renames the Gulf of Mexico, goes on the attack against Canada — a literal plot element from the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”— and stages a Tesla ad on the White House grounds.To watch presidential fiction today is to feel how the polarity has suddenly flipped. The base line assumptions about how power works and presidents behave — about what America is in the world — have changed. And the details that TV series relied on to seem politically realistic suddenly make them feel like transmissions from an alternative timeline.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Residence,’ Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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      A new murder-mystery series, starring Uzo Aduba, comes to Netflix, and Oscar-winning films come to streaming platforms.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 17-23. Details and times are subject to change.Something isn’t right?Natalia Grace Mans was adopted from Ukraine in 2010 by an American family. By 2011, they had argued to a court that they didn’t believe Mans was a child, as they had been told, and instead was an adult woman with dwarfism. Perhaps because of its similarity to plot of the 2009 horror movie “The Orphan,” the story went viral and became the topic of podcasts, news stories and a documentary series entitled “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” Now, a fictionalized version, “Good American Family,” is coming out this week. The show stars Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as the adoptive parents and Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia. Streaming on Hulu on Wednesday.The new mystery drama “The Residence” asks the question: What would happen if there was a murder at a White House state dinner? The series stars Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp, a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department who is brought in to question the personnel who were around when the crime occurred. And of course, throughout all of this, interpersonal conflicts arise, people start acting shady and secrets are revealed. Streaming on Netflix on Thursday.In the 1990s, there were a string of murders around the U.S. When the cases started getting media attention, the killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, would write letters to newspapers and police departments detailing the specifics of his crimes and signing with a smiley face, giving him the moniker “the happy face killer.” He is currently serving four consecutive life sentences. In the new series, “Happy Face,” Dennis Quaid is taking on the role of Jesperson in this fictional retelling of the terrifying and true story. Streaming on Paramount+ on Thursday.Celebrating music.This week, music will be celebrated at the iHeart Radio Music Awards. And though Taylor Swift finished with her Eras Tour, she continues to be top of mind — the show takes place on the two year anniversary of the start of the tour, so the show will feature a filmed performance from that first night. Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey will be honored, and LL Cool J is set to host. Monday at 8 p.m. on Fox.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More