“In the event that they share one unifying high quality, it’s the potential to maintain secrets and techniques,” wrote Kate Anderson Brower of the White Home workers in her 2015 guide The Residence: Contained in the Personal World of the White Home. The guide is the premise for the brand new Netflix present of the identical title, however that’s the place the similarities finish. Brower’s tome is a journalistic account of a number of generations of staff within the non-public residing quarters of the president of the USA and his household, whereas The Residence includes a neurodivergent-coded detective named Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) fixing the homicide of the top usher (performed by Giancarlo Esposito). The homicide thriller exists on the intersection of Elsbeth and Shondaland’s different White Home present, Scandal, combining political intrigue with parlor-room puzzlement—and that parlor occurs to be situated in essentially the most well-known home in America.
As Cupp makes an attempt to suss out potential suspects throughout the home and wider presidential workers, we’re launched to the housekeepers, butlers, kitchen and wait workers, engineers, custodians, curators, florists, gardeners, occasion planners, and secret service brokers who serve at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The present dramatizes what it is likely to be wish to work within the White Home, however simply how true to life is it, homicide apart?
The White Home includes a labyrinthine 132 rooms throughout six flooring and two mezzanines. The chief residence is situated within the heart of the constructing, and contains quite a few State Rooms, plus the non-public quarters of the primary household on the second flooring and third flooring. Previous to 1902, the president’s workplace was situated within the residence, however Theodore Roosevelt had it moved to what’s now often called the West Wing. In the present day, it takes round 100 full-time and 250 part-time staff to maintain the residence working easily, together with the top usher—the homicide sufferer on the present—who’s principally the chief of workers. The sheer variety of staff “are there to alleviate the burdens of each day life for the primary household, who typically don’t have any time to prepare dinner, store, or clear,” Brower writes.
