The Residence (2025) #
— Season 1
Phenomenal. Uzo Aduba is great.
Perfect modern cozy closed-room murder mystery with an underestimated, eccentric, savant detective.
Only quibble is with the final episode. The final reveal was a little long-winded, and went on a little long.
I was a little disappointed that the killer wasn’t somebody that I suspected. It’s a super hard line to walk as a writer: if you’re going to have a twist or murder or something, you want it to be telegraphed a little bit because a totally random surprise is not interesting. But you also don’t want it to be too obvious, because that risks being predictable and boring. If you’re going to err to one side or the other though, you should err toward obvious because the viewer wants to feel clever.
It also leaned a little hard on the whole birding thing in the final moments. “You have to ask yourself the question that every birder is obsessed with: WHY!” Mind you, I’m not a birder. But that doesn’t seem like a core quality of a birder. Patience, keen observation, meticulous attention to detail, tenaciousness, etc. These are all qualities of a birder. But unless I’m missing something, I can’t imagine a birder in the field despairing WHY OH WHY … is this bird here? Do I not see a bird?
Al Franken playing a senator is pretty funny.
I was shocked to learn that the original actor portraying A. B. Wynter died irl halfway through shooting and had to be recast. Talk about life imitating art.
The final scene was especially mystifying. I guess Jane Curtain was just entitled to a few more seconds of screen time. There’s no other reason for that to have been the season closer.
I caught a couple of easter eggs and hat tips. Such as Cupp referring to the “curious incident” of the dog in the nighttime. I’m not a huge mystery buff so I’m sure there were plenty of others that I missed.
Anyway this show was fantastic. Highly recommend. 5/5 stars!