‘The Residence’ Wants to Be ‘Only Murders in the White House.’ It Just Isn’t Funny

The success of Only Murders in the Building might seem, at first glance, like an unqualified good. It got nominated for a ton of awards. It created work for countless New York theater actors. It helped cement Selena Gomez’s transition from child to adult actor. It made a real-life couple out of Martin Short and Meryl Streep. But, sadly, there is one big downside: the knockoffs.

It’s not like Only Murders invented the whodunnit; it just broke out with a specific comedic style, and now too many creators think they can make a version that’s similar enough to pass. Bodkin drops a dour brunette among friendly chatters, like Mabel (Gomez) with her Only Murders neighbors. Based on A True Story makes true-crime fanatics face their own murder mystery, like the trio of podcast fans at the heart of Only Murders. Death and Other Details borrows both the singular location (a cruise ship instead of the apartment building of Only Murders) and the older/younger amateur detective dynamic. The post-Only Murders whodunnit series that feel freshest — like Poker Face, The After Party and A Man on the Inside — are the ones that share its comic snap. So when I read that today’s new murder mystery The Residence was going to be competing for awards as a comedy, it set a certain expectation. But I assume producers only decided it was a comedy after they had made it; otherwise, I can’t explain why there aren’t any jokes.

In The Residence, A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) is the White House Chief Usher — or, rather, he was, because in the cold open of The Residence’s series premiere, he is found dead. As soon as his body is discovered, officials like FBI Director Wally Glick (Spencer Garrett) and Irv Samuelson (Andrew Friedman), the head of the National Park Police, jockey for jurisdiction; however, investigating the crime, if it is one, falls to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. Thus, Chief Larry Dokes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) calls in “the best detective in the world”: consulting detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba). A.B.’s death would have been touchy under any circumstances, but because it has occurred during a state dinner for Australia hosted by President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald) and his husband Elliott (Barrett Foa), Cupp’s attempts to lock down the building and interview every person in it are even more complicated and unpopular. 

For the next several episodes, we are also trapped in the house, watching as Cupp considers the many people who might have killed A.B., including Sheila (Edwina Findley), the butler who thought she was going to get fired for getting drunk with the former First Lady at the party; Tripp (Jason Lee), the president’s trifling brother, whose penchant for hiding White House artifacts in his room A.B. was going to tell Perry about; and chef Marvella (Mary Wiseman), who screamed “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU” at A.B. in front of a kitchen full of witnesses. Many others emerge as “interesting” to Cupp, who declines to use the word “suspect,” infuriating Edwin Park (Randall Park) — that’s the FBI agent Cupp believes has been assigned to make sure she doesn’t get into anything she’s not supposed to, but who insists that he’s just there to help her with her investigation.

Kate Andersen Brower is credited on the show as the writer of 2015’s The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, a nonfiction book about staffers who work in the titular location. That’s probably why the action of The Residence TV show frequently stops down to tell us things like historical details about the building, or the logistics involved in hosting a state dinner; regardless, a new paperback edition touts it as the “inspiration for the Netflix series.” I haven’t read the book — which became a New York Times #1 bestseller back in the era when living in the White House seemed like something one only approached with great humility, before we knew any old trash could do it — but it feels safe to assume a story about a Chief Usher dying on White House premises under suspicious circumstances isn’t in it, and was the invention of the show’s credited creator, Paul William Davies.

I don’t want to lay all the show’s problems at Davies’ feet. But the previously cited best of the Only Murders-alike shows come from creators Rian Johnson (Poker Face), Michael Shur (A Man on the Inside) and Christopher Miller (The After Party): all of them have prior experience writing comedy. This hasn’t been Davies’ journey. Having started on the steamy infidelity thriller Betrayal in 2013, then proceeded to 15 episodes of Scandal, followed by his first creator credit with the legal drama For the People, Davies has a perfect CV to make a show under the Shondaland shingle, which The Residence is. What Davies’ previous credits haven’t prepared him for is writing a show its platform intends to promote as a comedy.

Davies is apparently the project’s one and only writer, at least judging by the seven screeners Netflix provided; it’s possible the eighth I haven’t seen was written by someone else. It’s also possible that the eighth episode is where everything locks in and becomes a laugh riot, but everything leading up to it sure isn’t. The issue isn’t that it’s making jokes that aren’t to my particular taste; it’s that the dialogue simulates the rhythm of jokes without any humorous content. 

For instance:

Edwin: You know, it doesn’t have to be this way, between you and me.
Cupp: How would you like it to be?
Edwin: More respectful?
Cupp: You want me to respect you — for what, I don’t know you.
Edwin: I don’t know you either, but I respect you.
Cupp: That’s different.
Edwin: Why?
Cupp: Because I’m Cordelia Cupp.

Or:

Marvella: I am trying to cook.
A.B: They need to have a look around the kitchen. It’s protocol.
Marvella: Well, my protocol is that I’m trying to cook when I’m trying to cook, so, uh, unless they cook, I don’t want them in here while I’m trying to FUCKING COOK.

Or:

Edwin: Why are you using that phone?
Cupp: Only phone I have.
Edwin: You don’t have a cell phone?
Cupp: No.
Edwin: You don’t have a cell phone.
Cupp: No.
Edwin: You don’t have a cell phone?!
Cupp: This is why I never let you ask any questions.

I have to assume the rat-a-tat screwball pace and repetition are meant to evoke The West Wing, but whatever problems I may have with that show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, he does know how to write a joke, like this one from “Lord John Marbury”:

Leo: You’re really gonna let him loose in the White House, where there’s liquor and women?
Bartlet: We can hide the women. But the man deserves a drink.

Another way Davies papers over the deficits in his comedy writing is with references. “I don’t care if she’s Miss fucking Marple, or Sherlock Holmes, or whoever the fuck Daniel Craig is in that fucking movie,” sputters the president’s advisor, Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), early on. That’s not a joke, per se: it’s just a reminder of something else you know, in the hopes that your memories of it will fill in the writing Davies didn’t do. Some characters in the show are essentially just references: former actual senator Al Franken as a fictional senator; Eliza Coupe as a blonde conspiracy theorist politician named “Margery”; the aforementioned Lee as Tripp, a latter-day Billy Carter. I feel like the show Davies wanted to make was “Downton Abbey for the White House staff,” as Today blurbed for the book cover. Then, streaming platform research being what it is, maybe he was convinced to make Only Murders in the White House instead, and he had to strain to fit a naturally soapy concept into a quippy murder mystery format. And even if that’s not how it happened, something brought him here, a place he isn’t comfortable, not writing comedy because he is not a comedy writer.

If The Residence couldn’t work as a comedy — and it absolutely does not — then it could at least work as a mystery. But, as described in nplusone’s recent Netflix takedown, no one involved even trusts the audience to keep up. A witness will describe a scene. Then we see the scene she described. Then that scene will be described again at a Senate hearing about White House security the night of the state dinner. Mention of a plot point will trigger a flashback to a scene from the beginning of the same episode we are currently watching. This show could have been a movie if it wasn’t constantly recapping itself.

Funny is the best thing this alleged comedy could have been. Failing that, it could have been entertaining. But a show about a famously smart protagonist really shouldn’t insult its intelligence as much as The Residence does. Decline your invitation.