There’s something strange going on within the residence of The White House. A lot of nervous aides, relatives and members are staff are wondering what’s going on in the private quarters of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But this has nothing to do with President Trump and his family, some of whom may or may not live with him at The White House.
This is The Residence, Netflix’s latest murder mystery starring Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp, the world’s greatest living detective and an avid birder. This is not Shondaland’s first time in The White House (see: popular ABC series Scandal) but this is Shondaland’s most comedic-centered series, a comedy drama series that is part Clue and part Knives Out.
“It’s not a hard comedy but I really wanted to have fun with it,” creator Paul William Davies tells Deadline. This pivot to laughs was intentional, Shondaland’s Betsy Beers told Deadline earlier in the year. “I started as a pretty bad comic actress, so it’s great to be actually able to participate and work on something which is this funny,” she joked at Natpe in Miami.
The Residence follows Cordelia Cupp as she is trying to discover who killed the Chief Usher of The White House, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who replaced Andre Braugher following his death. (This is technically a SPOILER but it happens within the first six minutes of the first episode).
But the case is complicated – there are 157 suspects, 132 rooms and one disastrous State Dinner featuring the Australians. Cupp must contend with a lot of motives and a lot of potential killers as she attempts to crack the case, which is also part of the most explosive Congressional Investigation since Watergate, and somehow also features Kylie Minogue.
The series has a large ensemble, which features Molly Griggs, Randall Park, Susan Kelechi Watson, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Edwina Findley, Jason Lee, Ken Marino, Al Mitchell, Dan Perrault, Bronson Pinchot, Julieth Restrepo, Mel Rodriguez, Mary Wiseman, Eliza Coupe, Jane Curtin, and Al Franken.
In a wide-ranging interview ahead of the series’ premiere on Thursday, March 20, Davies explains how he got involved in the project, which is loosely inspired by Kate Andersen Brower’s The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, how he figured out who the killer should be, why Detective Cupp is an avid birder and how the show dealt with the death of Braugher.
DEADLINE: What is the origin story of The Residence? It was first announced in development in 2018.
PAUL WILLIAM DAVIES: Shonda and Betsy optioned the book. It must have been 2018. I was still actually working on my other show [Scandal] that I did with Shondaland at ABC at that point. But I came over to Netflix in 2019/2020, something in that range. At that point they we were talking about development ideas, and they handed me the book and said, in an open ended assignment way that they do, which I love, ‘Can you just think about this? Read it. Think about it. See if there’s anything there for you.’ I did and I thought it was really interesting. I learned a lot of stuff, and I thought Kate Brower did a great job, with all of the history and the anecdotes but I didn’t quite know what to do with it, and they kind of kept saying just think any expansively.
When I worked on Scandal for years, and I’m speculating here, Shonda always loved kind of thinking about the staff or the Secret Service, and she often liked to think about their point of view on things that were happening for our central characters. I’ve never talked to her about this, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that was one of the things she was really attracted to in the book, that it was all that perspective and I really appreciated that too about the book. I just couldn’t figure out what the story was or what the way in was, even though I liked this stuff. Then I just had started doing my own research on the staff and trying to find out as much as I could, even outside the book, and I happened upon a C-Span video of the then Chief Usher, this was in the 1990s, testifying before a Congressional committee looking into White Water, the Clinton investigation, and the chief Usher and one of the deputy ushers were being asked about whether they would ever move stuff around on the third floor of the White House.
The politics of it wasn’t really interesting to me, 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’. They put up a floor plan and I thought I could do that. It’s a genre I love, and I’ve always had it lurking in the back of my mind that I’d like to do it. I then had this epiphany about taking all the stuff with the staff and all the fun things about the house – there’s this great stuff in Kate’s book about these mezzanines and staircases – and I could do that in service of a murder mystery. I typed out this crazy email in the middle of the night with my idea for it and [Shondaland] said ‘Great, try that’. That’s the origin. C-Span, of all things.
DEADLINE: You mentioned Scandal, how did it feel being back in The White House?
DAVIES: Good and also totally different. We did go to the residence sometimes in Scandal with Fitz and Mellie but that show’s center of gravity was the Oval Office and the West Wing and we don’t ever go there in this show, it’s exclusively in the residence. It really is a different choice.
DEADLINE: I’m assuming that was deliberate.
DAVIES: Absolutely. I really wanted to focus on the mansion and the residents. [White House Assistant Usher] Jasmine, played by Susan Kelechi Watson, says very early, ‘This is not the West Wing or the East Thing, we’re in the residence’. The people that work there are very distinct from the people that work over in the West Wing and I really wanted to keep the focus there on the lives of the people that work there and live there, and those relationships. There’s this sub-genre of murder mystery, the locked room mystery, where the dead body’s found in a sealed room and the doors are locked from the outside. It wasn’t quite like that. But I did like this idea of kind of a sealed house mystery. I really wanted to keep the four corners very well defined within the residence itself. It was very intentional that way.
DEADLINE: I interviewed Betsy Beers earlier this year and she was saying this show leans into comedy in a way that no other Shondaland project has done before. How intentional was that?
DAVIES: It was intentional. Very early on, before I came to Shondaland, I’d written and developed a bunch of comedies, that was my background. Scandal, even though it clearly was not a comedy in any traditional sense, had a deep bench of comedic writers, Mark Wilding and Allan Heinberg, and there was a lot of funny stuff in that show even though it obviously wasn’t the orienting principle of it. It’s not a hard comedy but I really wanted to have fun with it. There’s almost something farcical about the White House with all of the doors and people. The movie/play Noises Off was actually a big influence in thinking about the show because I love the theatricality of the White House, how there’s a backstage and an on stage, and we would see both of those things. There is a bit of performance to it. You go out into the state dinner, and you’re on stage there, and then you go back into the butler’s pantry or whatever, and people are fighting and doing shit and grabbing stuff, and then they go back out through the doors, and there’s misunderstandings. That’s the fun. It’s almost Fawlty Towers. I cast it with a lot of great comedic actors, but also folks who have a lot of range, who do a lot of things.
DEADLINE: I gather you’re a big murder mystery guy, a big fan of Agatha Christie. I love how each episode is named films like Dial M for Murder, Knives Out and The Third Man. You’re evidently leaning into a genre you love.
DAVIES: I am absolutely, and those are all influences. I probably could have kept going. That’s for people who like murder mysteries. Part of what is fun is the history of it and people really like the history of it. In some ways, it’s self-referential. That was what was so brilliant about what Rian Johnson did with Knives Out, it was very inspiring to people who loved the genre. There were all these great movies in the 1960s and 1970s, the all-star murder mystery casts, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Last of Sheila and then Clue. Then there was a gap for a long time and Rian really brought that back and said you can have fun with this again. That was great. He referenced the history of it a lot. I took my inspiration from that too. That’s what’s fun, the genre really does build on itself and I leaned into that.
DEADLINE: With such a murder mystery, do you start with the killer and work backwards or vice versa?
DAVIES: I spent a lot of time early on figuring out not just the killer, but the victim. Honestly, that was a really big part. They went hand in hand and I really kicked the tires on a lot of different [options]. Once I knew I wanted to do this in the White House, I had the sense I wanted to do it on the night of a big spectacle, and a state dinner seemed like the most fun. Then I figured out who was the person that would engender the most hostility or have the most tension that was believable from a wide range of folks, and really thinking through who that person was, what that would mean, and then at the same time, who would then be the person that was ultimately responsible for this, in a way where – and I really played around with a lot of ideas – I had to know very clearly early on, or the first possible stage, and then I could build everything around that. That was a kind of critical threshold decision that I needed.
DEADLINE: One of the challenges in a murder mystery is you don’t want it to be too obvious or too arbitrary, right?
DAVIES: That’s absolutely true, and I really wanted to keep everybody as viable as possible, as long as possible, which is why, when you even go into the finale, the most honest way to do that and not have it be cheat for the audience was to have Cordelia go into the summation not knowing herself, because then I’m not holding anything back from anybody. It was kind of her method to say I’ve narrowed it down. I know how it was done, but I don’t know who actually did it, and I’m going to use this process of the summation in order to find that out. Part of the fun of a murder mystery is transparency and fairness, and you don’t want at the very end to learn, oh, there’s a twin that you never heard of, or there’s a lake just off camera.
It’s a tricky balance, because I wanted to unpack things. If you go back and you watch episode one now you see in that first tour of the White House, when she goes through the basement, she sees Bruce the engineer ducking his head down and then she sees Elsyie slowly closing this door to the lower basement. You see them. You don’t know what it is. In that pilot, if you go back, watch like every one of those people that’s ultimately in the yellow oval room. In episode eight, I have established in [episode] one as being at least sketchy even if you haven’t heard much from them at that point.
DEADLINE: Cordelia Cupp is a big birder, it’s an important storyline. Was that designed to show the audience that this is a woman who really pays attention to detail?
DAVIES: That’s absolutely right. She processes information in a way that I think is very distinctive. Her behavior is almost bird like and the process birding is helpful to her. She has the line where she says ‘You don’t pick up your binoculars until you know what you’re looking at’. It’s the opposite of what a lot of people think, which is like, ‘Oh, I’m looking for a bird. Let me train and go right there’. But if you talk to a lot of birders, which I did for this, I’m not a birder myself, you’re taking in the landscape. You’re listening, you’re watching, before you focus on a particular part of the landscape, so that you can get your overall bearings in context. You notice when she first comes into the White House in episode one, she goes into that game room where the body is, she doesn’t even really look at the body. She’s looking at everything around it. She’s looking at the windows, the glass, the stuff on the billiard table. Then she leaves, and then she comes back, and she’s totally focused on the body. There’s a lot about that that she gets from birding. There’s a whole process to it and about kind of observing, listening, there’s patience, there’s silence and so it really is instrumental in kind of how she does her work and how she thinks about the job and who she is.
DEADLINE: As someone who isn’t a birder, how did you come up with that?
DAVIES: My stepdad is a is a birder, and so I’ve seen him a lot, and I was always kind of fascinated with his passion for it. I thought that’s an interesting thing that I might be able to work into this character. Honestly, in the early days of it, I was in my backyard during that early part of the COVID lockdown, and I had a couple of bird feeders, and there’s tons of birds back there, and I became kind of fascinated by them, and just liked watching them and trying to learn the little I could. It was kind of an organic process. But the more I read about it, the more I got into it, and the more I realized there’s a lot of stuff here that I could use. I think this could be a really interesting approach in terms of how she thinks about her job and who she is and then eventually I connected with a really incredible birder, one of the great birders in the world, who was very helpful to me in thinking about birds and it grew into something more than what I originally intended.
DEADLINE: You mention the pandemic, and you also had to pause production during the 2023 strikes. How did that impact the show?
DAVIES: It was difficult on a personal level, obviously. It was a challenge for us, as for all productions that were impacted in terms of shutting down and then restarting. You don’t just flip a switch and start shooting again after a long period of time, obviously. It was a challenge. But, we got through it in a way that was, I think, really impressive, and a testament to the production folks that did such a good job with it.
Giancarlo Esposito in The Residence (Jessica Brooks/Netflix)
DEADLINE: You also lost Andre Braugher during the middle of this. You pay tribute to him at the end of the season. How much of a challenge was that?
DAVIES: It was devastating, personally to me, and to so many other people on the show, some of whom had worked with him on other projects and knew him really well, and some people who got to know him like I did through this, but became quite close to him. He was a lovely, very grounded, very decent and wonderful human being, and, of course, an incredible actor. It was brutal and it was really hard for so many of us. We were lucky enough that Giancarlo [Esposito], who also knew Andre, was close to him and had the deepest respect for him, was able to come in and do that role, and do it in his own way, but also honoring Andre. That’s a very difficult assignment, just on so many levels and he handled it with extraordinary grace and navigated that in a way that comforted us. It was hard.
DEADLINE: Cordelia gives a speech in the final episode that almost feels like a euology to Andre. Did you write that after his death?
DAVIES: I did. There might have been a natural inclination to do that after the first episode, but for me, it was important to do that at the end of the whole series, to say, you were part of all this, and we have not forgotten you.
DEADLINE: The murder takes place on the night of a state dinner with the Australian Prime Minister. Let’s talk about the Australia. Kylie Minogue appears as herself. Hugh Jackman is referenced a lot but he doesn’t appear, did you try and get him to appear?
DAVIES: We did reach out to him, but he was right in the middle of something that was very time consuming, and he wrote us a lovely note back. I feel confident that he would have done it if he could have done it, and hopefully he enjoys the whole the gag of it. But, yeah, we did, knowing that was going to be exceedingly difficult. And frankly, same with Kylie. Then it worked out with her schedule and she was really game. She’s really fun and honestly, I was going to do less with her, because I didn’t think I had [time] but it opened up, so I wrote more stuff for her, as much as she could do and she, she did it.
Kylie Minogue in The Residence (Erin Simkin/Netflix)
DEADLINE: I suspect Les Beletsky’s Birds of the World might move up the book charts once this show comes out.
DAVIES: I feel like I’m birder adjacent at this point, and certainly now understand the scope of that community and how popular it is. Birding itself is kind of having a moment, in the last five years or so. It would not surprise me at all if things took off more and more.
DEADLINE: Have you thought about a second season?
DAVIES: I really love Cordelia Cupp. I really enjoyed coming up with her and writing her. Uzo is amazing. I love the relationship between Cordelia and Edwin [Randall Park]. There are lots more stories to tell about her adventures and him with her. We’ll see how people feel about the show but I certainly would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought a lot about it, and didn’t have a lot of ideas about where it could go.
DEADLINE: You could go to another residence, it doesn’t have to be The White House, right?
DAVIES: That’s absolutely true.
