The Residence is a quirky, new murder mystery from Shondaland. It’s by Paul William Davies, who TV fans may know from his time writing for other Shonda Rhimes joints, like Scandal.
Uzo Aduba plays Cordelia Cupp, our unconventional detective, brought in to solve a potential murder in the White House. She has a “reputation for solving unsolvable crimes,” as the characters repeat. She does so by refusing to speak first, creating a series of uncomfortable silences that the people around her manage to fill up, and using her keen intellect for seeing patterns and where they break.
Oh, and birding. She’s an avid birder, finding a metaphor in the hobby whenever she needs one and exasperating her employers, partners, and friends with her pension for wandering off with binoculars.
It’s good to see a Black woman in the eccentric genius role.
And Aduba wears it lightly, creating a gentle comedy that’s more soft-smile than laugh-out-loud funny. We’re talking about a show that has a lot of birding jokes. Like a flock of them, a murder, if you will. And Aduba owns her role, birds and all, taking up the frame with charm and grace, clearly comfortable being the smartest person in every room.
The Residence does right by her, neither de-sexing her or fetishizing her. She has one memorable sex joke that I’ve already seen memed. And the show also quickly puts her in the pantheon of great detectives, name-checking several including Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in Knives Out and Glass Onion, both of which The Residence owes a particular debt of gratitude to.
Of course, part of why Aduba is able to shine with so much peculiar humanity is that she’s backed up by a whole team of other people of color. Randall Park is phenomenal as her fumbling FBI counterpart Edwin Park, there more to babysit her than actually figure anything out. His straight-man insecure fumblings provide the perfect counter to Aduba’s Cordelia Cupp.
Rounding out their three-some is Isiah Whitlock Jr. as DC Chief of Police Larry Dokes, the man who brought Cordelia Cupp on for the case and her staunch defender. He’s truly loveable as the regular Joe among all the high-powered feds, delivering one particularly compelling monologue about one of the elite characters around him.
In terms of Latinas, there’s Colombian Julieth Restrepo and I’m not even mad that she’s playing a maid. This is an upstairs/downstairs comedy after all. As Elsyie Chayle, Restrepo gets a meaningful backstory, you just have to wait for it. I did want a little more on that front – the show hints at an abusive husband but doesn’t name it explicitly.
I just wish there’d been more Latinos on the cast to make the maid situation not our only option. Now Latinas do over-index as house cleaners – we’re 46.1% of the profession, despite being just 10% of the population. But that’s not the only thing we are! I’d have loved to see us in some other roles, upstairs and downstairs. I double-checked the ethnicity of some of the other bit characters. Yes, there are other Latinas, BUT they’re mostly background. We need more!
Still, The Residence clearly has its heart in the right place in terms of representation, politics, and more. Like Knives Out before it, this show manages to be more than its parts by virtue of its smart portrayal of race, gender, and class. Neither is about any of those things, but the ability to portray these complex social structures well is still a rarity in Hollywood. And I’m always grateful for Shondaland, consistently getting it better than most.
