‘Scarpetta’ Would Be Better if They Made One Change

The eight episodes of Prime Video’s Scarpetta series cover the beginning and end (?) of Kay Scarpetta’s career as a medical examiner. The seamless transitions between current events, the events at the beginning of her career, and the flashbacks to Kay (Nicole Kidman and Rosy McEwen), Pete Marino’s (Bobby and Jake Cannavale), and Benton Wesley’s (Simon Baker and Hunter Parrish) childhoods make this show difficult to “second screen” without losing track of the action and the storylines. So, put your phones down and pay attention if you decide to watch this one, folks.

The series blends Patricia Cornwell’s 1990 debut Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, with her 25th book, Autopsy (2020). I haven’t read those. I did read books seven and eight in the series because they were available on Libby without a wait. I thought they were dry, dull, and because they were published in the mid-90s, they felt outdated. The series tries to make up for what the books lack by padding every episode with relationship backstories, interpersonal conflicts, and red herrings. It isn’t so much that we’re brought into the middle of the story; it’s more like we’re being brought in at the end and forced to play catch-up with very little exposition. The flashbacks are mostly used to tie the cases together through the timelines, but they don’t really explain a lot about how the characters got from Point A to Point B.

The mystery of this premiere season is an overly complicated plot involving a murdered bio-engineer who was working on a project to print 3-D organs in outer space. The murder matches the MO of the first case Kay worked on as Chief Medical Examiner. It was also the first time she worked with Marino and Wesley, and now they are all second-guessing the outcome of that investigation from 20 years ago. It causes them to reevaluate their relationships with each other, which are also overly complicated. Kay and Benton are married, living in Wesley’s ancestral home. Marino is married to Kay’s wild-child sister, Dottie (Jamie Lee Curtis). They are staying with Kay and Benton while their own home is being renovated. Kay’s niece, Lucy (Ariana DeBose), is living in Kay’s guest cottage. She is navigating the grief of losing her wife a year ago by having created and spending all of her time with a life-like AI avatar of her wife who “lives” in the cottage with her as a program on her computer.

This theme of dealing with loss and grief touches multiple characters and informs the plot of the series. A suspect, who is also a grieving widower (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Anson Mount), asks the philosophical question of whether or not 3-D printed organs can be used to build a synthetic human. Kay is still deeply affected by having witnessed her father’s murder as a child. She denies Dottie the right to have any feelings of her own about his death, complicating their relationship, which is also compromised by both of them trying to mother Lucy. Marino and Benton are both still grieving traumatic childhoods. All of this personal anguish bubbles to the surface in all of the characters’ interactions with each other over and over again throughout the season.

On top of all of that, Kay, Benton, Marino, and Dottie are all keeping secrets from each other. All of it acts as an unsubtle poison in their relationships with each other and in their ability to investigate the mystery at hand.

As complicated as the murder plot is, it feels ancillary to the relationships between the main characters this season. So this is a show less about a murder and more about the people. That tracks for the two books of this series that I’ve read, which were heavy on the character development. But for the non-book readers, it might make this a difficult watch.

Something else that makes this show hard to watch is Nicole Kidman. She’s terribly miscast in this role. Although Kay Scarpetta is supposed to be cultured and “classy,” it’s hard to buy Kidman as a shopkeeper’s kid who has toughed her way through a male-dominated field to Chief Medical Examiner. She hasn’t looked like someone who works for a living since Far and Away. She’s the least expressive member of the ensemble, and it’s distracting. I know she’s an Executive Producer on the show and, without her, it would not have happened. But I think other actresses could have played Kay Scarpetta. Off the top of my head, I thought of Laura Dern, Laura Linney, Helen Hunt, Naomi Watts, and even Jamie Lee Curtis (with a different wig) would have been good choices. The relationship between Kay and Dottie never gelled for me. Curtis’ Dottie is brash and gaudy. She is Donna Berzatto in a manic episode. Kidman doesn’t match that energy, even in her most combative moments of the series. It makes her scene partners look like scenery chewers. And it makes it difficult to connect to the character.

On the other hand, Bobby and Jake Cannavale are perfectly cast as Pete Marino. They took notes from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, where Kurt and Wyatt Russell were cast as the same character at different ages. Marino is the cop who is easily underestimated by everyone around him, and even himself. The father/son duo effortlessly embodies Marino’s sense of determination and loyalty. While the story doesn’t portray Marino in the best light at all times, you get a good sense of the man and his relationships with the Scarpetta sisters.

Simon Baker’s Benton Wesley is a frustrating enigma. The character is almost immediately untrustworthy. But we don’t learn quite enough about him to make a decision. Even in the final moments of the show, we’re left questioning Wesley’s background, goals, and incentives

Ariana DeBose does some great work in a bad haircut/wig in Scarpetta. I wish she had been given more to do, but she makes the most of her screentime as Lucy.

The series also features Amanda Righetti (who worked with Baker on The Mentalist) as Young Dottie, Charlie B. Foster as Young Scarpetta’s assistant Wingo, Tiya Sircar (The Good Place), Sosie Bacon (Smile), Anna Diop (The Man In My Basement), Stephanie Faracy as Kay’s treacherous assistant, and Luke Jones.

Scarpetta’s show order was for two seasons. The first ends in a jaw-dropping cliff-hanger that left me frustrated, and a lot of unresolved tension between the main characters. Although no official date has been announced for season two, it looks like we’ll see it sometime in 2027. We should all be happy they aren’t taking a three-year break, I guess. Until then, all episodes of Scarpetta are available to stream on Amazon Prime.