It's not easy being a TV snob. Ask anyone who is still haunted by Kenneth Branagh's diabolical grey moustache in Murder on the Orient Express. Or, while we are at it, anyone who still feels physical pain at the memory of Daniel Craig's horrifying Benoit Blanc accent in both of the Knives Out films.
If you are this snob and refuse to accept incorrectly coloured facial hair or slaughtered Texan accents from your fictional detectives, Netflix's murder mystery The Residence and its eccentric detective Cordelia Cupp are here to save the day. In simple terms, if Craig's Benoit and Branagh's Poirot are the boiling tea that spills from kettle to hand, Uzo Aduba's (Orange is the New Black) Cordelia is the dab of toothpaste you smear on your burn.
Magnetic protagonist
Created by Paul William Davies and produced by Shonda Rhimes' Shondaland, those who have admired the show's anthemic knowledge of the White House layout will be intrigued to learn that it was inspired by Kate Andersen Bower's nonfiction book, The Residence: Inside The Private World Of The White House.
The Residence's answer to Sherlock Holmes, Cordelia has the fashion sense of Indiana Jones, the memory of an elephant (or a CPU) and a lot more love for birds and tinned mackerel than she does for her fellow people. For the sake of a dead man in the White House, however, Cordelia is willing to battle her low tolerance for humanity during eight hour-long episodes, wading through the myriad of exhausting stories nearly every suspect brandishes before her.
By eruditely extracting nuggets of truth from bald-faced lies misformed memories, Cordelia ever so satisfyingly unmasks the murderer she has pursued in a long awaited denouement, sliding into place amongst television's other great brainiacs – and making our fictional world of whodunits all the better for it. Stitched together with a watertight script and original jazzy orchestral soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh (whose work you can also relish on The Royal Tenenbaums), here lies a murder mystery that is the equivalent of a box of posh chocolates: irresistible and unforgettable.
A classic whodunnit
Have no fear if you have an aversion to gore. The only individual who experiences any sort of violence here is our poor dead victim, and his murderer is kind enough to carry out their little escapade away from the prying eyes of the camera. This crime is as aseptic as these things can be, and if we are privy to any blood, we almost have to squint to see it.
What, then, do we need to craft this box-of-chocolates bloodless whodunit? We begin with a dead White House head usher, AB Wynter, brought to life – if only for a short while – by Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito, meeting his end at the hands of a devious killer.
Our devious killer strikes amid a chaotic Australian state dinner where nearly everything that can go wrong has already done so. Had our hapless usher not already perished before the night was over, it is entirely possible he would have keeled over from the stress of managing the circus that is his staff. Sadly for him, this is his circus, and these are his monkeys. Like the stoic captain of the Titanic, he is there at the helm, prepared to go down with his ship to the bitter end.
Part of Wynter's circus includes an assistant usher who wants his job, a volatile chef aching to serve her guests a meal with literal fire, a pastry chef who has meticulously crafted a dessert slated to offend Australians (you may not believe desserts can hurt feelings, but this pastry chef finds a way) a social secretary who has no idea where to seat her guests, a drunk butler, and whole host of additional subordinates who have either publicly wished Wynter ill will or proclaimed a loud desire to kill him. This is something they are about to heartily regret.
In addition to these tiresome subordinates wreaking havoc, Wynter also has important guests to keep placated: Kylie Minogue (yes, the real Kylie) with an oddly specific request, Hugh Jackman (not the real one, but be on the lookout for a the back of a dark head and an upbeat Australian voice), an Australian prime minister, a wayward foreign minister, a POTUS with the personality of wet cardboard, alongside the President's idiot brother causing no end of trouble somewhere upstairs.
Wynter does not have to deal with any of these people for too long, because his corpse is soon found on the third floor of the White House, two floors above the state dinner. A horde of befuddled law enforcement agents from the Secret Service, FBI and CIA converge upon this unfortunate finding, trying to find any way of passing this off as a suicide so that the state dinner remains as untainted as possible. (The first rule of hosting is that when explaining dead bodies to your guests, suicide trumps murder.)
The woman saviour
Unfortunately for all of these law enforcement head honchos, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department has the foresight to bring his friend Cordelia alongside him. Within minutes of examining Wynter's body, Cordelia throws water all over everyone else's fervent hopes of a suicide. Wynter, as is obvious to everyone except the police officers who have cast a cursory glance his way, was definitely murdered, and it is now Cordelia's daunting task to find out who, amid the hundreds of people and menagerie of mendacious witnesses in the building, could have done it.
Testing her acerbic wit to the outermost bounds of its tether, Cordelia's job is not helped by the President being awkward about acquiescing to her investigative methods, nor the superfluous agents (or 'dudes', as she labels them in a most unimpressed manner) pestering her about when she will be done, not unlike a child in the backseat asking, "Are we there yet?" The beauty of The Residence lies not just in how Cordelia solves an unsolvable murder without killing anyone herself, but the primal human emotions that drive the actions of every person she speaks to, as well as those of the only man beyond her reach: Wynter himself.
The deck is laid out. There are no unfair surprises or rabbits pulled out of thin air. Like Cordelia, you need to take the time to get to know the people at the periphery of this murder. Do not be the viewer who grunts, "This could have been a two-hour film," The best box of chocolates should never be rushed and demands it be remembered and revisited. The Residence is that box of chocolates. It exists to be savoured from start to finish – and all over again.
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