‘Scarpetta’ Season 1 Review: Nicole Kidman and the Case of the Explosion at the Wig Factory [C]
Nicole Kidman is allergic to unemployment. It simply does not cross her mind to stay home when there are so many television projects deemed worth her time. In the past few years alone, Kidman can be found in Paramount+’s Lioness, Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, and Prime Video’s Expats. She’s also had movies, like Babygirl and Holland, so she’s been in more projects this decade than most could ever dream about. Returning to Prime Video this fall, Kidman can now be seen in Scarpetta, Prime Video’s adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s best-selling medical thriller novels. Unfortunately for Kidman, the series spends its entirety attempting to justify its own existence to no avail, meandering through the plot over an unnecessary eight episodes that struggle to create and maintain intrigue.
Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Kidman) is a forensic pathologist that works as the county’s Chief Medical Officer in Virginia. The series begins by thrusting her into a case, everyone immediately identifying her at the crime scene as the renowned Dr. Scarpetta, known for excellence in her field. She’s the person at crime scenes that everyone respects, recognizing her name and talent before she’s even arrived. Kidman is reliably good as the main protagonist, although the series doesn’t actually give her much to do. She’s married to an FBI profiler, Benton (Simon Baker, The Mentalist), but the two’s relationship has a strain to it that offers years of wear and tear on their marriage without ever diving in too deep. She brings on a retired homicide detective for assistance, her friend Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale, The Watcher), who happens to be married to her sister, Dorothy (Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once).
Scarpetta makes the family drama known immediately, a brash Dorothy moving through rooms like a hurricane in contrast to the rest of her family, clearly making Kay uncomfortable most of the time. Dorothy spends her time trying to connect with her daughter, Lucy (Oscar winner Ariana DeBose, West Side Story), who has recently lost her wife but still communicates with “her” via a computer programming app that utilizes AI to create Janet (Janet Montgomery, 1923) on screen. It’s an awkward enough premise, but Scarpetta does what it can to utilize Janet, who mostly only speaks to Lucy — who lives in a smaller house behind her mother’s main house — but has a couple of key scenes with other characters where she’s used to push unknown information into their consciousness. Dorothy and Kay have a fraught relationship, their personalities clashing as total opposites, but this is made worse by Pete’s possible attraction and interest in Kay. Everyone in the family has issues buried within, other than Dorothy, whose issues are constantly vocalized in the loudest manner possible by Jamie Lee Curtis.
While all of this is happening, Kay is making connections to a case from her past while she investigates the latest murder. Scarpetta quickly introduces a dual timeline that gives weight to the story, setting it up to obviously have a connection to her current investigation. Past Kay, played by Rosy McEwan (Black Mirror), is constantly seeking respect in a male-dominated field. The series reveals she’s known Pete (played in the past by Bobby Cannavale’s real-life son Jake) since the early stages of her career, which explains why she picked him to help her in the current timeline to investigate the newest murder. The past also reveals the beginnings of her relationship with Benton (played in the past by Hunter Parrish, The Other Black Girl), which strives to bring humanity to the coldness and shrewdness of Kay, but the relationship falls flat in both timelines. In the past, it’s a tumultuous beginning, but the present is a struggling romantic relationship that doesn’t feel like it can be saved anymore. The past doesn’t bring much new information to the screen because everything presented in the present seems so obvious. Scarpetta falls victim to mystery tropes including a brilliant investigator and red herrings.
The series spends eight episodes — all given to critics for review — setting up a story that fizzles out by the end. Nicole Kidman tries her hardest to make the premise fascinating, to three-dimensionalize Kay Scarpetta, but it seems that her stories might work better as novels. The series spends entire episodes focused on the backstory of certain characters that could have been quickly done across the episodes. Instead, everything feels disjointed as Scarpetta spoon-feeds the audience information when it deems fit. Eight episodes feels like too much for such a simple story that seemingly could have been told in half that runtime, reiterating similar or same ideas so often that it feels monotonous only after a few episodes. There’s a flatness to every scene that feels reminiscent of a CBS legal drama pumped out quickly for consumption on a streaming service. What’s not flat are the wigs, specifically the ones sitting on Curtis and DeBose’s heads. No part of the budget went to these shake-n-gos, as they feel pulled straight out of a bin someone just happened upon at Walmart. Prime Video invested in a dud, sadly.
Although Nicole Kidman is in many projects, all of them can’t be great. Scarpetta is a masterclass in undercooked storytelling, bringing the boring events of the past to light as the newest investigation in the titular character’s life makes her question her current reality. The characters are boring and the plot lacks anything of interest, the newest series from Prime Video is one that could lose audiences only after a few episodes. The series can’t compete with its own source material, which should have given the creative team plenty to work with — there are 29 novels, certainly there was more to pull from. The case of Scarpetta is one that doesn’t feel solvable, a series that will likely get shelved.
Grade: C
Scarpetta season one will premiere March 11 on Prime Video.
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