The Residence on Netflix: Creator Paul William Davies explains the Australian connections in whodunit mystery

It was Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the dagger. Or maybe it was Kylie Minogue in the Lincoln Bedroom with the candlestick.

The White House is throwing a state dinner for the Australian Prime Minister, the foreign minister, the defence minister and a menacing industrialist.

While Kylie performs downstairs, upstairs, the dead body of the White House usher lies in the billiards room. Everyone is a suspect, even our national chanteuse.

The president’s chief adviser, exasperated, explains to the tweed-clad detective, “Australia didn’t even want this dinner, we had to beg them to come. Do you know how shitty you have to be to piss off the Australians?

“That’s what the last administration did, time and time again, and we are trying to clean up that mess. Despite the fact they gave us three Crocodile Dundee movies, Australia is important to the United States.”

And Australia is important in the new Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix whodunit, The Residence, and our cultural inferiority complex – you know, the one that gets excited whenever a bigger country notices us - just got a massive level-up.

Created by Paul William Davies, who previously worked on Rhimes’ political soap opera Scandal, The Residence is a classic closed-house murder mystery. The house just happens to be one of the most famous in the world and the suspects include some of the most connected politicians in the world – and Kylie.

Davies told The Nightly that the production had reached out to her “on a prayer” and was surprised when she said yes.

“She was just delightful and totally game,” he said. “When she came, obviously because she’s Kylie, she’s got a lot going on and so we tried to minimise the impact on her, but she was really up for doing whatever, so I kept trying to write little things, and more things because she was up to doing it.

“That became really fun in (episode) five. There are these great scenes with her and she’s really funny. She’s got great timing, everybody loved having her and she was a joy to have on set.”

It was a reunion for Kylie with Julian McMahon, her former, briefly, brother-in-law, who had the gig of playing the fictional PM, Stephen Roos. Davies even knew McMahon was the son of a real-life PM. “We talked a lot about that when he was on set, he told me all kinds of things about living at The Lodge,” Davies recalled.

Despite all the Australian connections in the show, Davies has never actually been here, nor is there someone significant in his life that hails from down under, although he did have a roommate in graduate school that was from Melbourne.

“I chose Australia because I really wanted the show to be fun,” he explained. “The idea of Australia being the rival or have this tension with the US seemed kind of fun because it’s slightly preposterous, not that there aren’t any issues or could be.

“I wanted the state dinner to be around a country that wasn’t a typical adversary of the US, and that there was a tension between the president and the prime minister, and that is a choice I did not regret for one second because it was a lot of fun.

Obviously, The Residence is make-believe, a universe in which Australia is still (or again) important to its president, a scenario that seems increasingly unlikely in the real world.

But the series was inspired by a non-fiction book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Anderson Brower, which detailed the history of the non-political staff that have worked in the iconic building. All the ushers, maids, servers and engineers ensures its smooth running.

When Davies read the book, he didn’t know at first what to do with it until he had a late-night epiphany to marry it with his long-held desire to do a whodunit.

“When I looked at the floor plan of the White House, and you see the games room and the library, it’s like a Clue(do) board. That’s really when I thought, ‘Oh, I could have a lot of fun with that’.”

Davies’ fascination with the genre started, as it does for many people, with Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. What’s what he read growing up.

If you look at The Residence’s idiosyncratic detective, Cordelia Cupp, played with aplomb by Uzo Aduba, her wardrobe is inspired by Sidney Paget’s illustrations of Holmes in Conan Doyle’s books. There’s no deerstalker but there’s plenty of tweed.

“(Holmes) was also an odd personality, not that I think of Cordelia as odd, but just in the sense of being distinctive and having his own rhythm and the way he did things, being comfortable doing things in a way that other people found uncomfortable.”

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are influences, as was Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig’s mercurial detective in the Knives Out mysteries.

“Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is an incredible movie in resuscitating the genre,” Davies said. “It was always such fun in the seventies and eighties and then you just didn’t hear or see as much of it for decades. Knives Out really sparked everybody again to, ‘Oh yeah, you can have these big all-star cast, fun murder mysteries.”

Davies said part of the appeal of the whodunit is referencing all the work that came before, because “people really care about the history of the work”.

To that end, the series’ episode titles are named after Alfred Hitchcock films, Edgar Allen Poe stories, Conan Doyle works and the 1973 film The Last of Sheila, written by Anthony Perkins, of Psycho fame, and Stephen Sondheim, and which influenced Johnson’s Glass Onion.

In the murder mystery world, it’s all self-referential, which is why people love it so much.

If The Residence takes off, you could easily see a world in which Cordelia Cupp becomes a modern name of whodunit sleuths as much as Benoit Blanc, with the possibility that she could jump from case to case.

“I think she could,” Davies said. “I hope she does, and I hope I have the chance to do it. If people are enthusiastic about the show and her, then I’m certainly excited about it.”

In the show, there’s a reference to an impossible murder the detective had previously solved in Melbourne. Maybe Australia will get to be at the centre of another Cordelia Cupp mystery.

The Residence is on Netflix from March 20