[COLUMN] In The Residence, the White House is the Scene of the Crime | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Residence, the eight-episode murder mystery on Netflix. It’s pretty good - clever, fun, thoughtful. It suffers a bit from the modern streaming bloat, a sense that this eight-episode miniseries might have worked better as a two-hour movie, but it’s a pretty good time. Note that this piece will spoil the identity of the killer.

In the eighth and final episode of The Residence, a murder mystery set at the White House about the investigation into the death of Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Abuda) grabs a knife and plunges it into the wall of the Yellow Room. It’s a key narrative beat, as Cupp cuts away at the wallpaper that conceals a hidden door. However, it’s also a handy visual metaphor for the show’s central themes. This is a murder case where the White House is a victim.

The Residence draws from the non-fiction book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by writer Kate Anderson Brower, although the narrative and the murder are creations of showrunner Paul William Davies. The series is defined by its meticulous recreation of the White House, created across seven sound stages, with 10 miles of molding, 200 working doors and 144,000 pounds of flooring. The White House really is a character within the world of the show.

The Residence repeatedly draws attention to this physical space. The camera moves through corridors in long takes, orienting the audience within the building. The show uses cutaways to help the audience get a sense of where each room sits in relation to the others. White House Executive Pastry Chef Didier Gotthard (Bronson Pinchot) even builds a ginger bread model of the building, with cutaway rooms and gummy figurines. The show pays attention to the architecture of governance.

Davies recalls being inspired to build a murder mystery at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after watching C-Span coverage of the White Water scandal. “The politics of it wasn’t really interesting to me,” Davies concedes, “but what was interesting to me was them just talking about the third floor of the White House, and at one point he was talking about the game room and the solarium and the music room. I was like ‘It’s a Clue board’.”

One of the more interesting aspects of The Residence is the extent to which its Commander-in-Chief, President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald), is a non-entity within the story. Kylie Minogue (herself) and Hugh Jackman (Justin Ellis-Johnson) are much more central figures within the narrative than Morgan. The show largely avoids the Oval Office. “We’re not over in the East or West Wing or Oval Office,” acknowledges Davies. “It was really important to just show the residence.”

Wynter’s successor, Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson), pushes back on the implication she is “a political appointee.” She responds, “The work of the White House Residence staff is not political in any way.” The Residence is about the mechanics that keep the White House working, literally and figuratively. “It is a tribute to the people who make the White House function and run,” Brower explains. “The maids, butlers, chefs, ushers kind of operate in the shadows but are crucial to the sanity of the first families.”

The Residence begins with the death of A.B. Wynter, the man largely responsible for managing the household staff and ensuring that decorum is maintained. In that sense, Wynter serves as an avatar for the White House itself, a physical manifestation of the institution. He is a figure of continuity in the midst of a political maelstrom, ensuring that the independent departments all work together in harmony to facilitate the mechanisms of governance. His death is an attack upon the White House.

The Residence arrives amid a recent wave of pop culture particularly focused on the American Presidency and the White House. Netflix recently launched the miniseries Zero Day, which starred Robert DeNiro as a former President tasked with managing the response to a deadly cyberattack. Captain America: Brave New World starred Harrison Ford as a President of the United States who developed the unfortunate tendency to turn into a giant red rage monster.

It's not especially difficult to pinpoint the root cause of these contemporary anxieties about American political power and infrastructure. The United States is in political chaos at the moment. However, many of these films and shows struggle to identify or engage with the actual substantive problems, whether because of the accelerating pace of the political volatility or because of a reluctance to directly acknowledge what is happening.

The Residence works better than these other examples because it engages with these ideas through metaphor. Much like Rian Johnson’s recent whodunnits Knives Out and Glass Onion, The Residence avoids getting too deeply mired in the specifics of the moment, allowing for exceptions like the character Margery Bay Bix (Eliza Coupe), who is obviously “a conspiracy-addled Marjorie Taylor Greene type.” Instead, it approaches this crisis allegorically.

The Residence places a strong emphasis on procedure and propriety. Accounting for the disruption caused by the President’s brother Tripp Morgan (Jason Lee), Haney explains that “there are things you just don't do in the White House. Especially when you're a guest. You don't walk around the White House in bare feet. You don't just go and ‘hang out’ with the staff. You don't use the White House Physician, who is here for the President, for emergencies, for your own personal shit.”

While most murder mysteries are puzzles that can be solved using information within the narrative, the best examples of the genre tie those satisfying plot pay-offs to a larger theme. In many of the best whodunnits, the reveal of the killer is also a revelation about the nature of the story being told. After all, one of the key functions of an investigator is to construct a compelling and convincing narrative of events, to offer a satisfying explanation for the events that have occurred.

Early in The Residence, it is established that Wynter was struggling to keep pace with changes in Washington. “A.B. was constantly under assault,” offers Lilly Schumacher (Molly Griggs), the social secretary for the new administration. “And I'm not sure he ever really clicked with the Morgans.” However, it quickly becomes clear that the clash was much more specifically between Wynter’s understanding of the White House as an institution and Schumacher’s desire to reinvent it.

“This is not uncommon,” Haney acknowledges. “Social secretaries and their people come in with every new administration, and they want to do things their own way. And we've always done things our own way. In the House. It's a structural conflict. Us versus them. This was just more extreme.” Schumacher boasts to the First Gentleman, Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa), that they have an opportunity “to really reinvent the White House and what it means today.”

According to Metropolitan Police Department Chief Larry Dokes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Schumacher wanted to completely restructure the White House from the ground up. “The look of the House mainly,” Dokes explains to Cupp. “New uniforms for the butlers and the housekeepers. She's renovating some rooms. She started in the Blue Room.” It is a complete overhaul, and Schumacher meets strong resistance from the veteran staff.

“Listen, I appreciated the work that they were doing, but these staff people, some of them are stuck in the 1960s,” Schumacher protests at one point. “Literally, anything you ask them to do, it's like, ‘We haven't done that before.’ Well, okay! We're doing it now.” Schumacher has no respect for the idea of institutional memory, of the idea that the White House might have existed before she redesigned it and that it might need to continue afterwards.

This a very straightforward metaphor for the attacks on the institutions of American governance over the past decade. In a literal sense, the Trump Administration posed its own challenges to the White House staff. Trump would literally clog up the toilets with torn up classified documents, which was bad for the building’s plumbing. During the pandemic, Trump returned to the White House while infected with COVID, threatening infected staff into silence.

More broadly, it works as a metaphor for the dismantling the federal government through organizations like the Department of Government Efficiency, which fired hundreds of apolitical government employees in ways that have been disruptive to the basic functioning of key institutions and infrastructure. The Residence was written and filmed before Trump’s reelection, but this paranoia about “the deep state” been part of Trump’s agenda dating back to his first administration.

It is revealed that Schumacher killed Wynter. “She did it because she hates you,” Cupp tells Morgan. “And by you, I do mean you, Mister President. But I really mean all of you. The House. Like, the actual House. Like, the physical space. Have you seen what she's done to the Blue Room? You don't do these things unless you really hate this place. But also, like, the House as an idea. As an institution. She hates it. The history. The traditions. The staff. What it represents… America, I guess? She hates it.”

The Residence is candid that the White House is a dysfunctional institution. Different factions within the household exist at odds with one another. The building itself is old and worn. There is a strong recurring emphasis on the household’s plumbing; President Perry Morgan’s most active contribution to the narrative is a subplot focusing on his obsession with his shower’s heat and water pressure, while the conflict between Tripp Morgan and Wynter comes to a head over Tripp’s clogged toilet.

However, despite this dysfunction, The Residence understands that this institution serves a clear purpose and that it is beholden to the American people rather than the political objectives of a given administration. There is no “deep state” conspiracy, there is just the state. There are human beings, as complicated and as messy and as contradictory as human beings can be, just trying to do their best under the circumstances.

The Residence is a timely story about conflict between the political and administrative classes of governance, rendered as a murder mystery. The Residence is less about a murder at 1600 than it is about the murder of 1600.