The Residence S1E4: The Last of Sheila

Four episodes in, and it’s clear The Resident is squarely good but not great. It’s got a killer premise and setting, a great cast, a compelling mystery, and some very fun moments. It’s also much slower than it needs to be, often stopping to recap things we’ve already seen, as if this were a weekly show instead of a bingeable, rewindable Netflix series. (Although we suspect the recaps are for viewers who were half-watching while looking at their phones.

So our opening scene, in which Cordelia takes her nephew birdwatching on a remote beach, has some nice moments. We get, via the nephew, that Cordelia’s sister finds her obsessive, stubborn, and uncompromising. So she tells the nephew a story, in which Cordelia honed her detective skills as a child, finding her sister’s lost sock, which had been a gift from their brother who died young. It’s a well-put-together sequence, with good performances from the child actors — both the nephew, and the young Cordelia and her sister. But it’s a ten minute sequence that essentially tells us nothing we don’t already know about our detective. Like most origin stories, it’s self-indulgent. And we want to get back to the dead body in the White House.

And back in the White House, we get a look at Cordelia’s birding journal, in which she has a page on each person of interest, which is mostly an excuse to run down the characters we’ve focused on in the previous episodes. So now we’re fifteen minutes in without anything we don’t already know.

We finally move on to this week’s person of interest: Sheila, the butler whose cigarette Cordelia found on the grounds last episode. The night of the murder,she was bringing vodka to Ms. Cox (Jane Curtin), the President’s irascible (and alcoholic) mother-in-law. Despite orders from the First Gentleman not to serve her, the staff would rather risk his wrath than hers and therefore they indulge her.

Sheila ducked into the game room, pre-murder, to have a few shots herself. She spins a story in which she was delighted with her job, very good at it, and enjoying the party so much she indulged in a little pick-me-up. This version of events is immediately torn to pieces by the rest of the staff. She wasn’t doing her job well, or at all. She was chatting with the guests instead of working, was reprimanded, and snuck off for a drink when she should have been working.

We again get into the stresses of the job, and the tension between the career White House staff and the presidential administration (specifically Lilly, the social secretary, who we never spend much time with but seems to be involved in everything).

After Cupp is done questioning Sheila, Randall Park’s FBI agent, annoyed with Sheila constantly changing her story, has a monologue recapping the testimony we just watched. Again, the show spends a lot of time recapping and reminding of us things, which is never a great dramatic choice, but it at least leads to a very quick, very effective scene of Cupp breaking down Sheila’s lies and working out what really happened. 

All of this is a long way around to saying Sheila was asked to fill an empty seat next to a former First Lady who she had a good relationship with. It hit Sheila hard when the previous First Family left, and she’s been disgruntled ever since. That created tension between her and Wynter. And seeing the staff happily chatting with the previous First Lady upset the current President. So Wynter pulled Sheila off the floor and chewed her out behind the scenes.

So we have yet another person who was angry with Wynter and threatened him publicly, who Cordelia doesn’t think is the killer (and we don’t, given we’re only four episodes in. But halfway through the series, we’ve got an hour-long episode that probably could have been 15 minutes long without losing anything. It was a great 15 minutes, but it doesn’t bode well for the second half of the season.

Amendments:
• “The Last of Sheila” is a reference to Herbert Ross’ 1973 murder mystery film of the same name, which Rian Johnson cited as inspiration for Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out, which was the previous episode’s title.

• There were accusations Sheila helped the previous first family steal furniture from the White House when they left. This is based on a real-life scandal when Bill Clinton left office in 2000, which turned out to be a complete fabrication. (The Clintons, in fact, left furniture behind that they were supposed to take with them.)