What on earth is going on? This is the question that kept coming to mind while watching Scarpetta, Nicole Kidman’s new series in which she plays a brilliant but haunted forensic pathologist investigating a grisly murder. The confusion isn’t for any storytelling reasons, though the show’s entangled family tree surely could be better spelt out earlier on, but due to the fact that the subplots are so disparate and strange that at any given time I was inclined to hit pause and double check that my TV hadn’t switched to a rerun of Bones or Black Mirror.
Scarpetta’s opening minutes are bleak. A woman’s body lies naked, bound and bloodied next to railroad tracks in the middle of the night. Both her hands have been cut off. It’s the sort of grim image you might expect from a heavy-hitting detective drama like, say, True Detective or Mindhunter – certainly the introduction of an FBI criminal profiler suggests shades of the latter, as does the show’s prestige-sounding premise. Kidman is the imperious Dr Kay Scarpetta who, decades after her first run as Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, returns to the post when a crime turns up bearing a freaky resemblance to a serial killer case she worked on years previously. (The show shuttles between the present day and the past, where Kay is played by British actor Rosy McEwen.)
But Scarpetta never delivers anything close to the sort of depth that might warrant its graphic brutality. Instead, those scenes feel out of key with everything else in the show, which veers heavily towards melodrama as it juggles a grab bag of tones and themes including federal corruption, Russian spies, astronauts, and AI wives. At one point, bioengineered organs drop from the sky.
How disorienting you find Scarpetta will depend on how well you know the books on which it is based. The juggernaut forensic thriller series by Patricia Cromwell began in 1990 and continues to this day; long-time fans will know Cromwell started going a little off-piste with her ideas around book number 10. Incidentally, rather than basing the series off any one of the 29 novels in the franchise, veteran TV writer Liza Sarnoff (Lost; Barry; Deadwood) has mushed together a bunch of elements from different books, which makes sense given this Frankenstein’s monster of a series.
Holding the show together, and guaranteeing it a No 1 spot on the Prime Video charts, is its A-list cast, which includes Jamie Lee Curtis on manic form as Kay’s erratic older sister Dorothy; Bobby Canavale as Dorothy’s rough-around-the-edges cop husband; Ariana DeBose as their tech genius daughter; and Simon Baker as Kay’s FBI husband (with a secret?). They all commit to the bit, and admirably so, even when the script has them behaving in ways that no human being has ever behaved. One particularly violent outburst comes laughably out of the blue.
As for its lead, Kidman is dependably magnetic, and this role follows on from a slate of similarly schlocky but addictive shows like The Perfect Stranger and A Family Affair. In Scarpetta, she stares off into distances, huffs, puffs, and says things like, “Is it a second chance? Or am I just looking to mess myself up again?” All in all, the Oscar-winner playing a detective of any kind was always going to make for compulsive viewing – which Scarpetta is, if you can get past the tonal whiplash.
