Write On: 'The Residence' Creator & Showrunner Paul William Davies

“I didn’t really set out to make Cordelia (Uzo Aduba) quirky. I
just wanted to make her distinctive. I just really thought about
who I wanted her to be and how I thought [birdwatching] would be
an interesting way for her to approach her job. And the very
first thing that came to me was just her use of silence and her
ability to just be comfortable in situations that might make
other people uncomfortable. And it’s a quality that I’ve seen in
certain people that I’ve always admired and been fascinated with
because there’s nobody quite like Cordelia, but I’ve seen
glimmers of it,” says The Residence creator and showrunner Paul
William Davies about creating his lead character Cordelia, a
detective who uses her birdwatching skills as framework for
solving cases. 


On today’s episode, we talk with Paul William Davies about The
Residence, the new Shondaland show streaming on Netflix. Set
behind closed doors at the White House, The Residence follows an
offbeat detective, Cordelia Cupp (Aduba), as she investigates the
murder of a lead member of the White House staff. Davies says the
idea came to him watching a hearing on C-SPAN that went into
details of the White House’s layout. But the show is more than
just a game of Clue set in the upstairs-downstairs world of 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. The show goes deep into character and offers
plenty of laughs along the way. 


Davies talks about what he’s learned working with television
revolutionary Shonda Rhimes, the intense work that goes into
structuring a murder mystery, and shares his advice for anyone
who may be working on their own TV mystery.  


“I think it’s really important that you think about what the
environment is that you’re having this murder mystery in, and
making the motive something that feels like it’s related to the
world that you’re working in. In most murder mysteries, the
murderer is doing it for money or for love or lust. And that’s
probably in 98% of the ones that you read. And that’s fine… But I
think really giving a lot of thought to, what is the motive here?
How do I keep it organic to this world and these people, as
opposed to it just being grafted onto it, which I think sometimes
does happen. Make sure that the killer is doing something that
feels like it’s part of that world for a reason that is related
to that world,” he says. 


 


To hear more, listen to the podcast.