Shonda Rhimes White House murder mystery The Residence was almost a dark Kevin Spacey show

The house that Shonda almost didn’t build. “The Residence,” Shonda Rhimes’ soapy new murder mystery set in The White House, was headed in a dark direction before a shocking Hollywood sex scandal stopped the series dead in its tracks.Inspired by Kate Andersen Brower’s book of the same name, the TV whodunnit was originally set as a political drama a la “House of Cards,” with Kevin Spacey attached to produce, Brower told The Post. Brower, who covered the Obama administration, began writing “The Residence” in 2012.The book documents the White House staff’s upstairs-downstairs relationship with US presidents and their families over the years.

Filled with juicy and hilarious tales from behind the closed doors at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it became an instant bestseller when it dropped in April 2015.Soon after, Hollywood came calling. “By that summer [of 2015], Kevin Spacey had optioned the [book’s] rights — and this was ‘House of Cards’ time; this was pre-scandal,” Brower recalled, referring to the success of Spacey’s Netflix series prior to his fall from grace over allegations of sexual harassment and assault.Development on Spacey’s version of “The Residence” — which included former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as a co-executive producer — got far enough along that he and his production company, Trigger Street, hired scribe Dustin Lance Black to pen a pilot script. “He was great,” Brower said of Black, who won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the Sean Penn-starring Harvey Milk biopic, “Milk.” “It was actually more of a ‘House of Cards’ [style show]” she added.

“It was fiction.It was dark.

It was not a comedy at all.”“Lance wrote this wonderful pilot.[TV network] FX was involved.

And then everything kind of went to ‘you-know-what.’”In October 2017, actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of attempting to “seduce” him in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and the “American Beauty”...