Appropriately for a parent company (Amazon) that specializes in book sales, on Kindle as well as old-fashioned paper, Prime Video is making a name for itself by adapting the stories of literary mystery heroes so familiar to a large fan base of readers that they can go by one name. Bosch. Cross.
And now Scarpetta, as in Kay Scarpetta, the driven medical examiner whose clinical tales of dissection and detection have amassed nearly 30 volumes to date since Postmortem in 1990. It seems incredible that it has taken this long to adapt Patricia Cornwell‘s bestsellers for small or big screen, but their time has come, with Nicole Kidman training her icy gaze on bodies living and dead in the title role.
The series unfolds over two timelines, toggling between them through all eight episodes (dropping at once for binge purposes). Kidman stars in the present-day story, when the seasoned forensic pathologist returns to her Virginia roots after years away in Boston, resuming her role as the state’s Chief Medical Examiner. The other dates back 28 years, when the young and inexperienced Kay (the 1990s version played by a bland Rosy McEwen) tackles a troubling murder case that comes back to haunt her all these decades later.
Connie Chornuk/Prime
But the tonal imbalance is even greater when the procedural aspects, grisly as they are including in the graphic autopsy scenes, too often take a back seat to overwrought domestic angst that makes you want to kill most of the people on screen. Kay’s snake pit of a workplace, where she’s overseen by a health commissioner (Lenny Clarke) who was once her resentful rival, pales next to the battleground of her home life, where she lives in the plantation-style estate of her husband Benton (The Mentalist‘s Simon Baker), an emotionally withdrawn FBI profiler.
Their home is anything but peaceful, thanks to her overbearing and much-married sister Dorothy, played at full bellow by Jamie Lee Curtis, who seems to have wandered in from a bad Designing Women knockoff. Sloshing alcohol in a variety of voluptuous costumes, Dorothy never stops snipping at the uptight Kay, except when she’s snapping at her ex-detective husband Pete (a hangdog Bobby Cannavale, whose younger self is played as a blunt instrument by his sonJake), and badgering her daughter Lucy (West Side Story‘s Ariana DeBose), who in the weirdest subplot is burying her grief over the death of her wife Janet (New Amsterdam‘s Janet Montgomery) by hanging out obsessively with Janet’s overly sympathetic AI avatar.
These tiresome scenes continually pull focus from the main event, a new murder that bears an unsettling resemblance to Kay’s first major case, making her and Pete (her unofficial partner) question whether they got the right culprit back in the day. This also sets up an interesting conflict between Kay and husband Benton (played in the past by Weeds‘ Hunter Parrish), whose separate investigations go down different paths, though he’s professionally bound not to share information with his frustrated wife, who may be overstepping her job’s bounds in any case. Even this tends to get lost in the narrative’s busy and overstuffed structure.
As the genre demands, both timelines lead to Kay being in dangerous proximity to a killer. But by then, we’ve experienced too many red herrings the size of Moby Dick, making the denouements feel almost as random as they are bloody.
As Cornwell has proved with her books, and with TV precedent including Quincy, M.E., Crossing Jordan, Body of Proof and Britain’s long-running Silent Witness among others, the morgue can be a lively place to stage a crime drama. If Scarpetta returns for a second season, I hope it can benefit from this critical autopsy, with one key recommendation: Simplify.
Scarpetta, Series Premiere, Wednesday, March 11 (eight episodes), Prime Video
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