I love a good whodunnit. Or a good Who Has Done This, I should say, in honour of Andre Braugher, who passed away midway through filming The Residence. He was replaced by Giancarlo Esposito, who did a magnificent job, although I do wish we could have seen Braugher’s version of it.

The Residence, written by Paul William Davies, who previously created “For The People”—another series produced by Shonda Rhimes (as The Residence was)—was based on The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by journalist Kate Andersen Brower. It’s a good whodunnit, a sort of more focused, more comical Gosford Park, an ‘Upstairs/Downstairs’ peek into the lives of the people who make the White House run combined with a murder-mystery. It has a compelling mystery, a decent number of plausible misleads, a charismatic (if nearly too eccentric) lead detective and an array of comic foils. 

But it’s a bad TV show. It’s eight episodes, each at least 50 minutes long, totalling to just shy of eight hours of TV show. It does not have eight hours worth of story to it. Maybe it has six hours? My gut says five-and-a-half, but you need at least one big parlour room recap in your closed-house Who Has Done This, so let’s make it an even six.

So what fills the other 25% of its runtime?

Recapping information you already have. A great deal of time in The Residence is dedicated to re-explaining things you already know. There’s an old cartoon called Clerks: The Animated Series, based on the film by the same name, and one of my favourite things about it (outside of nearly everything, because it’s a hilarious cartoon) is that the second episode of this one-season-long TV show is a ‘clip show’.

A clip show, if you’re not aware of the concept, is an episode of a tv series where—usually via some flimsy pretext—the showrunners use clips from past episodes to fill out the runtime without needing to shoot a lot of new material or write anything funny. Instead, they just go ‘remember that time you did something funny?’ and then they cut to a clip of that happening. Or ‘boy we’ve sure had some crazy guests drop in’ and then they cut to a montage of guest stars.

The purpose of a clip show is to save money, or to give the crew a break, or, often, both. Clerks: The Animated Series hadn’t been on long enough to earn a break or spend any money, or produce any clips, so what we got was a very funny but dumb episode recapping things we’d literally only just learned in either previous or same episode. They peppered in some new “clips”—also not technically how a clip show works (which Community did a fun riff on too)—and then tied it all together in a neat bow.

I bring this up because The Residence also shows us clips of information we only just learned in the same episode. And as the show goes on, it becomes more and more clip heavy as our consulting detective Cordelia Cupp works through the information she has at hand to solve the mystery at the heart of the story.

The thing is, I don’t outright hate this. The characters in The Residence—the suspects—omit details that they feel will embarrass them, so when others give conflicting statements, Cordelia needs to recount their testimonies to give them an opportunity to account for their omissions. That’s just detective work. That’s how mystery stories work. Using clips to show how context has been omitted to create a narrative is a good way to achieve murder-mystery storytelling, in my opinion.

But The Residence goes far beyond simply having Cordelia Cupp pause, turn back and say “just one more thing” 15 times an episode. The Residence recounts the entire case over and over, like it’s a leitmotif in a musical. By the time The Residence finishes, you will have seen Mary Wiseman’s Marvella say “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!” seven times by my count. If you don’t count the first episode, where they establish the mystery, that’s once per episode.

Which might not seem like a lot, but it’s five more times than you need to see it for such an obvious red herring. She’s a curly-haired ginger firebrand who fucks the Foreign Minister of Australia at a White House function, she’s pretty memorable.

But this is how you make a mystery show for Netflix in 2025, I guess. Shonda Rhimes is a smart person, one of the most successful showrunners of all time. And The Residence is a Shondaland show—I have to assume Shonda Rhimes wouldn’t be receptive to the sorts of notes Netflix has been known to give out. Paul William Davies has worked with Shondaland for almost his entire career.

But Netflix is Netflix, right? By all accounts, they don’t care if people are watching their shows. Just that their shows are playing. In an essay for N Plus One magazine, Will Tavlin reported that “a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”” 

Give that link a read, by the way, it’s worth reading.

So maybe The Residence is how you find a happy medium between outright saying what your characters are doing and still catering to the people who are busy updating their Instagram Stories instead of watching the show they put on.

Maybe Liza Johnson and Jaffar Mahmood, who share directing duties on The Residence, found the intersection between attention-grabbing scenes and intelligent Who Has Done This story-telling for a platform that has relegated itself to second fiddle behind Tik Tok videos of How-Tos played atop Subway Surfers footage.

But as someone who still gives media my full attention, I gotta tell you realising “oh they’re doing this because people don’t watch TV shows properly any more” didn’t actually improve the viewing experience. Knowing why they’re grinding up gym mats doesn’t make the salisbury steak taste any better.

Let me pitch a solution that Netflix might actually go for. Do two separate versions. Do the “normal” version of the show for people to absent-mindedly click on while they hate-scroll through twitter. And then make a “I’m actually watching this” version for people who are actually watching things.

And I know what you’re thinking. “But that will cost money! Time!” Sure. But Netflix, you don’t have to differentiate between the versions when reporting your numbers. They count the same, baby. It’s like how pop stars keep doing new versions of the same album for weeks on end but with one new track, because streaming counts all those “deluxe albums” as one, and so an artist gets to chart for longer.

That could be you Netflix. Two versions of the same show and all you have to do is cut out two hours of bullshit filler?

That’s cash money baby.

If you’d like to read my attempt at a Who Has Done This, head over to the short stories page to see The Robot Butler Did It, which makes the error of telling you who did it in the title but it’s worth it.

I am currently reading Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. A wonderful friend shared their copy of it with me, as well as her copy of The Secret of Hanging Rock. It’s fascinating so far, as I’m only familiar with the story by way of Peter Weir’s film (although that film did have a significant impact on me). I’m enjoying it, although it’s obviously a product of its time.

I’ve been playing Blue Prince and really enjoying it. I’ll have thoughts available on https://thegapodcast.com/ when I finish writing them up—I’ve rolled credits on the game but I’m not yet done with it. I will say, however, that it’s about as far from The Residence as anything could get—if anything, you quickly realise you’re not paying enough attention in Blue Prince. Until I write it up, you can listen to Luke and I yap about it in at least episode 751. Probably more.

Writing on the first book in the Best series is going well. I continue to refuse to give solid estimates. “When it’s done” is the only estimate I can really give. I can tell you the title, or at least the working title: Final Final Girl. I can’t remember if I’ve said that before. I think the central mystery is a banger, and it’s a fun way to establish the series’ characters. Having watched The Residence, I’ll be sure to recap the entire plot every few pages.