Scarpetta Does What It Has To Do

Kay Scarpetta has been the main character in 29 popular mystery-thrillers by Patricia Cornwell, but she's never been depicted on a screen, large or small. That's not for lack of trying. Back in 2009, a film franchise based on Cornwell's novels was greenlit with Angelina Jolie attached to star as the exacting medical examiner. But that franchise never got off the ground and the books got stuck in development purgatory, until a few years ago when Jamie Lee Curtis acquired the rights to them from her friend Cornwell.

That acquisition led to the creation of Scarpetta, a generally compelling if plot-heavy crime drama that drops Wednesday on Prime Video. Rather than simply adapt Cornwell's first Scarpetta tale, 1990's Postmortem, showrunner Liz Sarnoff has chosen to blend elements from that novel with a much later one, 2021's Autopsy. That means the first season unfolds over two different timelines: one set in the 1990s, when Scarpetta first becomes the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, and another in the 2020s, when Kay returns to that role after years away from the Commonwealth. The separate chronologies are connected by a '90s-era serial killer investigation that involved a suspect named Matthew Petersen, a name that pops up in another of Kay's murder inquiries, 28 years later. Is it possible that they got the wrong guy back then? And why is Kay so anxious about revisiting the case that made her a superstar in her field?

This two-pronged approach enables Scarpetta to function as both origin story and contemporary murder-mystery — complete with references to AI companions and the manufacturing of synthetic human organs — while remaining faithful to Cornwell's work. Sarnoff, who has written for Lost and Barry, is more than capable of weaving multiple storylines into a tight, satisfying braid. For the most part, she and her fellow writers do that here, using the dual chronologies to underline the extent to which Kay and her loved ones continue to pick at the scabs from past wounds rather than letting them heal. That said, Scarpetta takes on a whole lot of story in just eight episodes. It's relatively easy to follow what's happening in both timelines, but the show's attention to detail requires the audience to keep track of a borderline overwhelming amount of information, including the identities of multiple victims, potential perpetrators, and law enforcement figures across two decades. It's not necessary to jot down notes while watching Scarpetta. But also: not a bad idea?

6.0

Scarpetta

at Prime Video

Like

• Compelling twists and strong performances — especially from Nicole Kidman

Dislike

• It tries to take on a little too much narratively and does not distinguish itself from other shows in the genre

Naturally a key to making this series work is casting the right actor as Kay Scarpetta. Nicole Kidman is, indeed, the right actor, and she embodies the elegant, somewhat icy Kay with an understated but unmistakable ferocity. Is it a tiny bit of a reach to believe that Kidman is a woman of Italian descent, especially in those occasional moments when her Australian accent seeps into her American one? Sure, but it's not enough to undermine her command of this performance, a controlled portrait of a woman who wants to control everything.

By contrast, Curtis plays Kay's boisterous and argumentative older sibling Dorothy as if she's just been shot out of a cannon into each scene. Dorothy can't loosen her grip on a grudge, or wear an outfit that doesn't emphasize her overflowing cleavage. She's a CHARACTER, all-caps intentional, in the same way that her character on The Bear, Donna Berzatto, is a CHARACTER. If you love Curtis in roles that give her permission to be extra, you will deeply appreciate her work here. If you find all of that energy draining, there are definitely some scenes in Scarpetta that will exhaust you, particularly her constant fights with Kay. 

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The men in the cast — Bobby Cannavale as a former cop and Kay's pseudo-partner in solving crimes, Simon Baker as Kay's husband, FBI Agent Benton Wesley — do strong work, too. But even though each principal character gets an episode named after them, complete with childhood flashbacks that highlight the traumas that continue to haunt them in adulthood, the men ultimately feel secondary to the central women: Kay, Dorothy, and Lucy (Ariana DeBose), Dorothy's daughter, who was primarily raised by Kay and happens to be a skilled hacker. Lucy is also grieving the recent loss of her wife, Janet, and coping by talking to an AI version of her, a storyline that is borrowed directly from Cornwell's novels but feels like it accidentally took a wrong turn on its way to Black Mirror and wound up in Scarpetta.

Younger actors play all of the main characters in the 1990s and have been convincingly cast, particularly Rosy McEwan as Kay. The British actress looks enough like Kidman to pass for her and brings a similar stubborn determination to the role that makes it plausible to think she's the same person.

This is the thing about Scarpetta: You can make a list of all the smart decisions its cast and creators make, which is why it's so puzzling that this first season — it is clearly set up for a second and will no doubt get one — doesn't leave more of a lasting impression. (Another item on the smart decision list: having David Gordon Green direct several of the episodes. He brings an almost scientific eye to the more grisly imagery, making this crime series less exploitative than so many others.) Part of the problem is, as I mentioned, the amount of story it's trying to lay out. But it's hard to ignore the fact that Scarpetta ultimately isn't doing anything all that groundbreaking. Cornwell's novels brought a forensic perspective to the procedural genre that felt fresh back in the 1990s. But we now live in a media landscape overflowing with murder shows that dig into autopsy reports and DNA samples. Cornwell was ahead of her time, but Hollywood was so slow to adapt her novels that Scarpetta now feels like something we've seen before. A pretty good version of something we've seen before, but still: nothing exactly new. 

Premieres: Wednesday, March 11 on Prime Video
Who's in it: Nicole Kidman, Rosy McEwan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, Simon Baker, Ariana DeBose
Who's behind it: Liz Sarnoff (showrunner)
For fans of: Patricia Cornwell's novels, forensic crime dramas
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8