Skip "The Residence," Watch "The Diplomat" Season 2 Instead

Netflix wants you to watch "The Residence," its new Kate Winslet murder mystery set in the White House. The streaming service plastered it across the homepage, sent push notifications, and bought enough ads to wallpaper a small nation. I watched all eight episodes. You should skip it.

The premise sounds promising: a dead body turns up in the White House residence, and Winslet plays a detective interrogating staff members to solve the crime. But the show mistakes quirky for clever. Every character speaks in theatrical asides. The mystery drags across eight episodes when it needed four. Winslet delivers her lines like she's reading them off cue cards while thinking about her grocery list.

Want a White House thriller that actually works? Stream "The Diplomat" Season 2 on Netflix. Keri Russell plays the U.S. ambassador to the UK who discovers a conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of government. The show moves fast, trusts you to keep up, and doesn't stop to explain every plot point twice. Russell makes ambition look electric instead of calculating. The season drops you into geopolitical chess matches without dumbing them down. Six episodes, zero filler.

On the music front, Raye's album "My 21st Century Blues" deserves more attention than it's getting. She wrote and produced the whole thing herself after her label refused to let her release it for years. The opening track "Introduction" builds from gospel piano into full orchestral soul that sounds nothing like anything else on the radio right now. Her voice can whisper through "Ice Cream Man" and then belt through "Escapism" without sounding like two different artists.

Skip the new true crime documentary "American Nightmare" if you hate feeling manipulated. The filmmakers structure every episode to withhold information, then reveal it for maximum shock value instead of maximum truth. They turn real trauma into a magic trick.

Sleeper pick: The novel "The Fraud" by Zadie Smith came out six months ago and nobody talked about it because it's historical fiction and people assume that means boring. It's not. Smith writes about a Victorian trial with the same sharp observations she brings to contemporary London. The sentences snap. The characters breathe. Give it fifty pages.