Actresses of a certain age are henceforth barred from investigating crimes on TV. Ma’am, we’re going to need your badge.
The latest to take up an insignia is Nicole Kidman, star of Prime Video’s new eight-part Patricia Cornwell adaptation, Scarpetta. Flinty-eyed, elegant, and as poised as Fremiet’s Jeanne d’Arc, Kidman radiates the inscrutable confidence of a blackjack dealer showing “10” or an elk prancing blithely through Yellowstone. Watching the Oscar winner’s turn as Cornwell’s 29-novel heroine, one is not so much unconvinced as unexcited. What personal demons will impede the hunt for a killer? What C-list scene-mate awaits Kidman’s character at home? We might not yet know the relevant answers, but the questions themselves are about as fresh as break-room coffee.
A survey of Scarpetta’s forebears underlines the point. Prime Video’s production has much to say about its protagonist’s difficult family, but so did HBO’s Mare of Easttown, which starred a then-45-year-old Kate Winslet. The series’s police can’t be trusted, but neither could officers in Jodie Foster’s season of True Detective. If Kidman’s character is tough, so were investigator types played by Sarah Lancashire (Happy Valley), Brenda Blethyn (Vera), Amy Adams (Sharp Objects), and Toni Collette (Unbelievable). Even Kidman’s pairing with “spouse” Simon Baker, a C-lister if ever there was one, feels familiar. The duo were husband and wife in an episode of Apple TV’s Roar.
Of course, formulaic crime dramas can be comforting. Viewers who hold onto Scarpetta like a security blanket will find no judgment here. For the rest of us, what is perhaps most surprising about the show is how boring it is. Though Kidman remains highly watchable in the fifth decade of her career, even she can’t rescue a story that would have struggled to prop up a 90-minute matinee.
That story concerns Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist of the usual steely determination. Summoned to the scene of a homicide one night, Kay discovers a body with links to a decades-old killer, a finding that calls into question her conclusions about a long-ago series of crimes. Over the course of the show, Kay’s investigation into the new murder gives way to her memories of 1998, where our protagonist is played by The Alienist’s Rosy McEwen. Did the young Kay solve her cases badly all those years ago? Or might a startling explanation allow her to reclaim some measure of professional pride?
Scarpetta contains the standard allotment of feints and false leads. Nevertheless, it struggles to fill the eight hours that Prime and showrunner Liz Sarnoff have inexplicably given it. For every scene of narrative consequence, another delves into matters of next to no regard: an AI girlfriend, say, or a “pseudo-spiritual grief cult” run “out of a veggie farm.” (Don’t ask.) The result is not a richly layered production but one that is plainly treading water until the big “reveal.” Because the show’s beats are so predictably timed, one knows not to get too excited about anything that happens before the last two or three installments.
One of Scarpetta’s digressions in particular is damaging to the show’s fortunes. Though neither Baker nor Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) is especially memorable as a thread in our heroine’s domestic tapestry, each does passable work in his supporting role. (Cannavale plays Kay’s brother-in-law in the 2026 timeline.) The same cannot be said, alas, of Jamie Lee Curtis, who chews the scenery to an extent rarely seen on “prestige” TV. Overpraised for her demented turn as Carmy’s mother in The Bear, Curtis has apparently decided to make a late career of playing hideously obnoxious, loudmouthed narcissists. Here, as Kay’s sister, Dorothy, the older woman destroys every scene she’s in, adding nothing to the series’s investigatory work and imbuing its household interludes with a painful histrionic charge.
Other elements of the program’s construction are flawed along more conventional lines. Like every forensic drama ever made, Scarpetta cuts to garish hypothetical “flashbacks” whenever Kay examines the site of a crime, a device clearly meant to show off her practiced eye. Behavioral-analysis claptrap abounds. The problem is that such inferences are often wildly speculative and will almost certainly lead to false convictions or arrests. “He put the nightgown on her just to cut it off,” Kay says upon seeing a crumpled garment next to a corpse. Um, no. You’re leaping far ahead of the evidence just to fill in narrative blanks.
HBO’S EXCELLENT MEDICAL PROPAGANDA
I will confess to having had exaggerated hopes for Scarpetta. As the writer of some of Deadwood’s and Lost’s best episodes, creator Liz Sarnoff was exactly the person to make something special of Cornwell’s airport fiction. Yes, murder procedurals are ubiquitous, but surely this one would elevate a sagging genre, delivering not just the normal thrills but something poignant, well-crafted, and true.
Nope, didn’t happen. A disappointment for all involved, the series flounders in its own superfluousness before drowning in an ocean of cliches. If I could have back the time Scarpetta cost me, I’d gladly take it.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
