Shonda Rhimes’ neoliberal whodunnit, THE RESIDENCE, made for a satisfying farewell to my Netflix subscription. Money is bad, and Netflix simply isnt that good.

Like any donor-class producer, Rhimes moves me to contempt for her glib, topical sense of humor and gratitude for the balm of that humor. It’s complicated.

THE RESIDENCE is a murder mystery set in the White House, full of upstairs and downstairs caricatures, and both sides of the aisle politics —replete with a pardon casting of Al Franken.

If you’re anything like me, you grew up on comedies that paid homage to Agatha Christie, like MURDER BY DEATH, HAUNTED HONEYMOON, and CLUE: THE MOVIE. Not all of the humor aged well, and like THE RESIDENCE they’re not all high art. But so what. It’s easy to pick apart the legal preposterousness of, say, MURDER SHE WROTE or MATLOCK. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the staggering number of murders that happen in St. Mary Mead, or Cabot Cove. Okay, MATLOCK took place in Atlanta so that tracks. We look past these things.

The central sleuth is Cordelia Cupp, played with requisite eccentricity by Uzo Aduba. Cupp, a birder, navigates the moving parts of a crime scene and those of a beltway political scandal with the same deductive analogues: What does this this bird do, and how can that lead me to this bird in its element? The KNIVES OUT movies may have set a precedent for this new breed of hyper-topical big flex whodunnits, but i enjoyed THE RESIDENCE more. It was less self-satisfied. And even as it indulged in the white hat vs black hat oversimplification of American politics it did so with a kind of make-em-laugh survival instinct.

There’s a dichotomy between conspiracy theories and murder mysteries. People often ask why are people so morbid, what’s with the fixation on murder? Whats with FORENSIC FILES? People embrace conspiracy theories because they lie adjacent to- and in opposition to a truth they recognize but cannot accept. Murder mysteries appeal to people who accept the chaos of the universe and the depravity of power systems, but simply need a fixed problem with a moral solution, in the meantime. Sure it’s formulaic and phony, but there is a part of us as readers and viewers and thinkers that feels like all these stories are practice for the real problem we’re too small, too outgunned, hell , too confused to solve just now. Everything is horrible. A lot of people are asking what can I do!? Others are saying, helpfully some, here’s what you can do.

Give me a small problem to solve, like a crossword puzzle. It’s as much as I can do right now.