How a Lunch With Michelle Obama Led to Netflix’s “The Residence”

Kate Andersen Brower was eating lunch with Michelle Obama when she came up with the idea for her first book.

It was 2011, Brower’s second year of reporting on the Obama administration for Bloomberg News. She’d dined in the White House before—“out of brown paper bags in the basement underneath the briefing room,” she says with a laugh. But this was different: a press luncheon hosted by the First Lady.

Brower was seated next to Obama, but her attention kept floating across the room in the East Wing—to one of the White House butlers. As the man flitted in and out, Brower noticed his rapport with the First Lady, how she called him by his first name. “It made me think: There’s this world of people who serve the President and the First Lady,” she says. That small observation would blossom into The Residence, Brower’s 2015 nonfiction book about the community of service staff working at the White House—and now an upcoming Shonda Rhimes–produced Netflix series of the same name.

Researching The Residence involved a great deal of reporting, says Brower, whose sources included retired executive housekeeper Christine Limerick and the late pastry chef Roland Mesnier, who recounted pulling an all-nighter to craft the perfect dessert for Nancy Reagan. Packed with intimate anecdotes from the East Wing, the book topped the New York Times bestseller list. Almost immediately, Brower got a call from then–Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who was working with Trigger Street—a production company owned by actor Kevin Spacey—to option the book. “Obviously, that didn’t work out,” Brower says.

In 2018, the book was optioned again, this time by Shondaland, the production company that Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Rhimes runs. The Netflix series, starring Uzo Aduba as a DC police detective, tells the story of a fictional murder mystery involving the First Family’s staff. But the details of how the East Wing works are rooted in Brower’s reporting, she says, as well as some of the characters, events, and relationships she detailed in her writing.

Between Covid, the Hollywood writers’ strike of 2023, and the sudden death of actor Andre Braugher, who’d been set to star as one of the butlers, production was delayed several times, but look for the show to premiere this March. Brower got to visit the Los Angeles set, which she says felt just like stepping into the White House. The Bethesda resident—who has written four more books since The Residence—hopes the show’s use of her book will make it feel realistic for people who actually work in that world, especially those who aren’t being talked about in the news: “I like to tell history from the perspective of people that are in the wings.”

This article appears in the February 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Kate Corliss

Junior Staff Writer