Nicole Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis in Amazon Thriller

Over the past decade, I’ve written repeatedly about Amazon‘s cottage industry of mononymous crime solvers adapted from bestselling airport novels — your Bosches and Crosses and Reachers, with “Jack Ryan” as the rare example of a potboiler hero whose last name proved insufficiently evocative to stand alone. 

For me, it’s the genre that represents the best and most financially logical of Amazon’s original programming ventures, overlapping easily with various retail opportunities. Though the shows have achieved varying levels qualitatively, perhaps their greatest collective merit has been their evident effort at fidelity to the source material. There’s no point, I can assume an Amazon executive determined, in hoping to cultivate watchers and readers of shared properties if you’re going to alienate an existing core fanbase. To what end? ART? Be serious.

This, then, represents the most intriguing thing about Amazon’s Scarpetta, Blumhouse Television’s wildly overdue series adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s books about chain-smoking, pasta-cooking, technology-wielding medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. I’ve only read a few of the books in the 29-book series, but watching Liz Sarnoff’s series version, I was struck time and time again by details that even this casual reader knew had been altered. Several conspicuous choices caused me to gasp at the audacious willingness to tick off devotees who have been waiting patiently (or impatiently, since nobody does anything patiently in our social media age) to see Kay Scarpetta and Dorothy and Lucy and Benton Wesley on the screen, big or small.

That’s probably the only audacious thing about Scarpetta, which comes in far below Bosch and Reacher on my ranking of Amazon’s best beach-read adaptations. It’s much closer to Cross, a series that kept me watching for Aldis Hodge and little else. But as much as I was or wasn’t entertained by Scarpetta as a TV show — it’s got some good adaptive ideas and some predictable ghoulish flaws — I’ll be curious to see if its audience is prone to flexibility. 

The alienating choices start with Nicole Kidman, an unquestionably versatile actress but not one instantly suited to a brassy Italian-American character whom I pictured as more of an Edie Falco type. For me, this isn’t an abomination on the level of casting Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, but I’m far more invested in Lee Child’s franchise.

The series, based loosely on Scarpetta’s 1990 introduction Postmortem (one of the books I’ve read) and 2021’s Autopsy, starts in the present day with the discovery of a naked and mutilated female body by the railroad tracks. 

The investigation marks Kay Scarpetta’s first since returning to her previous longtime job as chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, following time in Boston. Scarpetta is back in Virginia — Alexandria in the series, Richmond in the book — along with husband Benton Wesley (Simon Baker), an FBI profiler heading up a new unit after years on the serial killer beat.

Wesley is a Virginia native son and they’re living in his palatial family home along with, for tenuously explained reasons, Kay’s sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), a writer of children’s books, and Dorothy’s hubby Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale), a former detective whose professional relationship with Kay dates back decades. Both Dorothy and Pete are — let’s put it gently — larger-than-life figures and the spacious house is still too small for both couples.

Meanwhile, living in a guest house on the property is Lucy (Ariana DeBose), Kay’s niece and a former FBI agent and computer expert. Lucy’s wife Janet (Janet Montgomery) just died, but is still very much a part of her life in a way that’s equal shares emotionally impactful and dumb.

A set of fingerprints is found on the body from the tracks, seemingly connecting the victim to a series of homicides 28 years earlier — Kay’s first case on the job. And if the evidence is correct, it would suggest that Kay built her career on a lie.

As Kay follows the new case and deals with familial tensions, Sarnoff and the series’ directors, starting with David Gordon Green and Charlotte Brändström, take us back to 1998 and far younger versions of Kay (Rosy McEwen), Wesley (Hunter Parrish), Pete (Jake Cannavale), Lucy (Savannah Lumar) and Dorothy (Amanda Righetti). The case back then also involved the bodies of naked, mutilated women, plus all the sexism and homophobia that were pervasive in police work in 1998 and are apparently ship-shape today. Prejudice and injustice? Conquered!

The alternating timelines force the writers to do a lot of strained connection-building that, around midseason, ceases to be effective; the makers of Scarpetta were very smart about joining the murders narratively, but much less smart about extricating themselves creatively. Like Cross, it’s a too-familiar illustration of how many of these long-running franchises rely on the the same gawking victimization tropes over and over and over, remaining palatable only if you like the characters doing the investigations. I’m resistant to this Criminal Minds Syndrome, and far more so when the torture and murder, inevitably involving women, are visualized than when they’re on the page. 

As a plus, though, linking the cases across 28 years lets Scarpetta simultaneously feel like Season 1 and Season 29 of a television show. The 1998 storyline offers the rudimentary pleasures of characters meeting and interacting for the first time, spelling everything out to welcome new viewers; that, in turn, frees up their present-day versions to behave like the people with decades of shared experiences and withheld secrets. The 1998 storyline can be precise and procedural and investigative, while the present day storyline is emotionally messy and cumulative. 

In general, I respected the choice, even if the double-casting is a mixed bag.

Kidman is frazzled and raw in an effective way. Though she conveys almost nothing resembling the character I imagined off of the page — even Scarpetta’s family backstory has been changed for no clear reason — Kidman is perfectly matched by British actress McEwen. Their shared mannerisms and speech patterns allow the editors leeway to intercut, and blur, the time periods. The show demands that we understand how one Scarpetta could evolve into the other, and Kidman and McEwen succeed on that front. (Oh and don’t worry, the smoking remains intact.)

The casting of Cannavales, father and son, has a similar effect in allowing us to see clearly how that case shaped both Pete’s social attitudes and his physicality, for better and worse (without explaining how he became noticeably taller later in life).

The same cannot be said for Parrish and Baker. Their features don’t match, and the transition from Virginia-born Parrish’s Southern accent to Baker’s far less comfortable and consistent accent is just one of several reasons I didn’t buy the Benton Wesley arc at all; it’s ultimately a damning flaw, and will displease fans of the book.

As for the two Dorothys, Righetti is, dating back to her days on The OC, quite familiar with playing the flamboyant bad sister, while Curtis has won major awards for performances that, by any reasonable definition, are “big.” But Curtis spends much of the series too big, cartoonish in a world that requires at least some grounding. Dorothy is a flamboyant character, but there’s a point when she gets drunk and high and it all becomes overkill.

DeBose continues to struggle to find follow-up roles that capture the charisma that burst off of the screen in West Side Story and Schmigadoon!, but she nails a key moment in the finale with Lucy that articulates something smart that the show has been too dumb to even hint at previously.

Other casting highlights include a strong Sosie Bacon as a dogged reporter plagued with awful dialogue; an eerie Anson Mount as a mysterious figure from Kay’s past; and Montgomery, who delivers welcome warmth in a weird role.

The Scarpetta directors provide the requisite gore one would expect from a character who investigates killers and performs a lot of autopsies, but it’s rarely above television genre standard, and when the series reaches its climax and devolves into bland slasher tropes, it’s a real letdown. The cliffhanger that closes the season’s eighth and final episode was big enough to make me curious for a resolution. But will viewers scarred by the mixed level of source fidelity be as generous?