This month, the iconic character Kay Scarpetta of Patricia Cornwell‘s best-selling novels finally gets the small-screen treatment it deserves.
Amazon Prime Video’s Scarpetta follows the titular forensic psychologist, played by Nicole Kidman, as she wrestles with her past to solve a crime in the present.
The stacked supporting cast includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana DeBose, Bobby Cannavale and Simon Baker.
The show has received mixed reviews from viewers and critics, but you can count Watch With Us as definitively in the fans’ camp.
We explain why the eight-episode Scarpetta is a must-watch for crime show junkies.
Scarpetta follows Kidman’s Kay Scarpetta as she investigates a killing that bears unmistakable hallmarks of a serial killer she supposedly identified 25 years ago. But if the same killer is still free, did Kay imprison the wrong man? Kay then discovers that the weapon used in the current case is covered in the fingerprints of an exonerated suspect from the old case, further confounding and unsettling her. As Kay grapples with her domestic problems and the case at hand, she is plagued by her past, and the show plays out in two alternating timelines between the present and the mid-90s.
Rosy McEwen plays a younger version of Kay as she investigates the crime that would come to define her career. Ultimately, we see how the two timelines weave a compelling portrait of Kay’s life and work, and her dysfunctional relationships with her family: her husband Benton (Baker), sister Dot (Curtis), Dot’s husband Pete (Cannavale) — a detective who worked with Kay on her first case — and their daughter Lucy (DeBose). These complicated dynamics are intimately linked to the present-day crimes. Carried by Kidman in the present, Scarpetta is buoyed in the past by a riveting performance from McEwen, and it’s this dual-narrative structure that distinguishes it from other shows in the overcrowded mystery genre.
Kidman and Curtis Have Fantastic Chemistry as Unlikely Sisters
As Dot and Kay, Curtis and Kidman sport an authentic sisterly frustration with one another. Kidman plays the no-nonsense, straitlaced Kay, while Curtis is the overbearing and flamboyant Dot. Together, their conversations go from 0 to 100 in a matter of moments, escalating rapidly the way that a natural, warring sibling pair might. For Kay and Dot, their persistent conflicts are born from childhood resentments that have never been resolved into adulthood, and part of it comes from Kay having witnessed their father’s death when they were children. Now, they’ve been put into a pressure cooker due to the fact that Kay and her husband Benton are living with Dot, Pete and Lucy under one roof (for what reason, it’s unclear).
Kidman and Curtis are nothing short of exhilarating whenever they’re on screen together, but it should be noted that the entire ensemble of family members has great chemistry. While a crime drama in most obvious ways, the show isn’t without a sense of humor, and the constant head-butting and domestic chaos of the Scarpetta household isn’t just highly amusing, it’s also emotionally rich. The show deftly alternates between light-hearted comic moments and a strong sense of pathos, which the A-List stars are able to capture with nuance and aplomb by way of Liz Sarnoff‘s terrific dialogue.
Scarpetta is pulpy genre TV wearing prestige TV’s clothes — that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The show gets sillier and sillier across its eight-episode arc, but it’s never dull, and isn’t that the most important thing? Some of the things that occur in Scarpetta include a character who has a relationship with an AI chatbot incarnation of her dead wife, a B-plot about a company that 3D-prints human body parts, plus an excessive amount of ’90s-era misogyny, plenty of obscene shots of dead bodies and Curtis “breasting boobily” in cleavage-centric outfits at every turn. Also, it casts the very Australian Nicole Kidman as an Italian American, a part that calls more for an Edie Falco than an actress who played Satine in Moulin Rouge!
Ultimately, the crime narrative of the show ends up taking a backseat to the absurd, cacophonous family dynamics of the Scarpetta family, and Scarpetta’s changes to the source material may prove feather-ruffling to long-time fans of Cornwell’s books. Scarpetta is, thus, a mixed bag in many respects, but that’s also what makes it so intriguing. Isn’t it more interesting when media is alienating as opposed to accessible?
Stream Scarpetta now on Prime Video.
