The Residence

The Residence (2025) is an eight-part comedy murder-mystery set in the White House. The show exemplifies the enormous and distressing gap that presently exits between conventional TV narrative and the incredibly sophisticated production techniques by which such narratives are presented.  For the first couple episodes of this series, the viewer will be charmed, intrigued, and fascinated by the intricate (and apparently accurate) scene-setting and characters.  But by the fourth show, the program is treading water and has run out of ideas.  By the eighth episode, the thing has become an endurance test, almost unbelievably tedious and unimaginative.  The program is so bad that it rates as a "bait and switch" -- audiences will be hooked by the show's fast-paced and cleverly managed opening episodes, but beware:  what follows is extremely dull.  However, if you are invested in the story (a conventional whodunnit), you may find yourself in my shoes, watching the thing to its end to learn the identity of the killer even though the show has become almost unendurably protracted and boring.  (A hint:  consider all the characters who are presented as potential suspects and, then, ask yourself if one of these figures seems to be without any redeeming features at all -- that person, of course, unsympathetically represented by the program, will be disclosed as the killer.  I had lost interest in the mystery long before the 8th episode and was scarcely watching the show, although I sat quiescently in the room where the program was playing on my TV.  But my wife, who attends to such things, had figured out the identity of the killer by about the sixth episode and was watching merely to see how the case was made against this suspect.)

For the first six or so episodes, the show is sprightly, with high-tech camera work:  we see the White House through the eyes of a peregrine falcon and tour the grounds and corridors and rooms in the Residence in fast motion to name a couple of these effects. The cast is very large and excellent.  There is fine acting on display and many of the vignettes establishing the eccentric characters involved in the murder mystery are quite compelling. But each of the eight episodes is slightly worse and less interesting than the preceding show and the finale of the series (more than 100 minutes long) is catastrophically dimwitted and dull -- this gargantuan episode in which the detective who has solved the mystery filibusters to all the other characters for about an hour straight is close to unwatchable.  The premise of the show is that the head Usher (that is, the manager of the staff at the White House) is murdered during a State Dinner given for Australian diplomats.  A renowned detective with unerring instincts is summoned to solve the crime.  (This is a Black woman who plays the part of Sherlock Holmes -- like Holmes, she has uncanny powers of observation and ratiocination and is an avid birdwatcher as well.) This character, Detective Cupp, is wonderful for about four hours, but we're tired of watching her antics by the fifth show and her lecturing in the eighth and final episode, a part of the series she has to carry entirely on her own back is too much to bear.  There are plenty of interesting minor characters and the show is long enough to give them all a modicum of attention and something like a backstory.  We have the impression, before the thing goes off the rails, that we're getting a privileged, inside glimpse at how the White House is managed -- this accounts for much of our interest during the first few shows.  (The picture is brightly shot and makes an impression like Knives Out grafted to Julia Louis Dreyfus's comedy Veep.)  At first, the script is ingenious and full of good lines and the cynical, backstabbing characters are interesting enough to keep us involved.  But it just goes on and on and on and, ultimately, the plot is so intricate that you can't recall what has happened in the previous episodes and don't really care either.  The show's structure is based on a similar location-based mystery series, Only Murders in the House -- the program systematically considers each of about eight or nine primary suspects, makes the viewer believe that the suspect under consideration is highly likely to be the killer, but, then, establishes an alibi for that suspect so that the show can put the next character under the microscope, continuing in this fashion until the final episode.  Here is evidence of this show's incompetence:  there's a running joke that everyone wants to see and interact with the Australian movie-star Hugh Jackman who is attending the State Dinner.  Jackman is never really seen and the camerawork ingeniously shows us only parts of his face, his shadow, or his back when he appears on screen.  I kept expecting the final episode to show a full-frontal shot of Jackman at the end, therefore mocking the weird dodges employed to avoid picturing him.  But we don't ever get this pay-off.  It's astonishing to me that no one figured out that an insert of the actual Jackman for just ten seconds or so would have been the pay-off to a gag that runs throughout the whole show.  There are many other missed opportunities as well in The Residence.

Further illustrating the malaise that afflicts many Cable TV shows is the Amanda Seyfried series Long Bright River.  Again the disjunction between impeccable production values and a largely idiotic script is startling.  In this 2025 series, Seyfried plays a Philadelphia cop who stumbles upon femicide-style murders in which prostitutes (sex workers) are being killed by some sort of mad man who injects them with lethal doses of insulin.  The program features documentary style footage of homeless encampments and street people and the imagery is gritty, compelling, and ultra-realistic.  But this is coupled to an absurd plot that invokes just about every cliche that you can imagine -- Seyfried's sister, for instance,is a sex worker who gets kidnapped by the mad killer; the killer, then, stalks Seyfried and her very precocious eight year old son.  (Seyfried has dialogue with the boy about Goethe's Faust; of course, the kid attends some sort of ultra-elite private primary school and the lady detective can't pay tuition on her cop salary.  I told my wife that Seyfried's character should have the boy taken away from her by child protection workers for misrepresenting both the plot of Goethe's Faust and the program of Liszt's Faust Symphony.  Clearly, someone in the writing room was attuned to this problem because the dialogue alludes to the heroine's misunderstanding of these cultural monuments.)  The first episode is excellent and full of clever details and surprising plot twists -- for instance, Seyfried's character is given a middle-aged doofus partner, a man whom she is supposed to mentor but for whom she has contempt.  This is an interesting approach, with both an age and gender reversal in the relationship, and, maybe, it goes somewhere.  I don't know.  It was obvious that the show was just spinning its wheels and killing time by the end of the third episode and so I stopped watching it.  Time is valuable.  I abhor programs that gratuitously waste my time.