Nicole Kidman’s series is captivating—and does something unexpected.

The tough-minded female medical examiner has become a detective-show cliché—one that has apparently contributed to a boom in women entering the profession—but it wasn’t always so. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the creation of crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, was a pioneering figure when she first appeared in 1990’s Postmortem. Through the 28 books that followed, Scarpetta has shown herself to be passionately focused and elegantly turned out. The daughter of Northern Italian immigrants, she’s an excellent cook who makes her own pasta from scratch. She has an unreliable, extroverted sister whose daughter Kay has more or less raised, and the two sisters fight like cats and dogs. Naturally, in the first screen adaptation of this iconic character—Amazon Prime’s new series Scarpetta—Kay is played by … Nicole Kidman?

Granted, Kay, like Kidman, is blond, but the Australian actress best known for portraying manicured, WASP-y, upper-class women with perfect facades and dark secrets is probably no one’s idea of Kay Scarpetta. Then again, Scarpetta is also likely nobody’s idea of a conventional detective series. For one thing, at least as many minutes of the early episodes are devoted to Kay’s messy domestic situation as are to the case at hand. And even the case at hand is personally problematic for Kay because the dead woman whose body is discovered by the train tracks in the opening scenes has been murdered according to the pattern of a serial killer that Kay famously caught 25 years ago. If the same man committed this crime, then did our heroine get the wrong guy?

This may sound muddled, but Scarpetta works, perhaps against the odds, and it works splendidly. The eight-episode series—which has already been greenlit for a second season—begins as a peculiar fusion of family drama and icky autopsy-table close-ups. Kay tries to figure out why a weapon used in the recent murder is covered with the fingerprints of a suspect who was exonerated in that long-ago case. The viewers have plenty of other mysteries to puzzle over: Why has Kay returned to a job she left ages ago, and why are some people in the department less than pleased to see her back? Why are Kay and her husband, Benton (Simon Baker, with a buttery Virginian accent), living together in an enormous house with her sister, Dot (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Dot’s husband, Pete (Bobby Cannavale), when they all clearly drive one another nuts? And who exactly owns this fancy house, with its white-pillared portico and adjacent cottage, where Dot’s daughter, Lucy (Ariana DeBose), resides, surrounded by computer monitors and also being made crazy by her flamboyant mother? Come to think of it, who would willingly subject themselves to Dot? Curtis, true to form, plays her as an overbearing, self-styled bon vivant with a cleavage-forward wardrobe who celebrates her daughter’s birthday by donning a sequin-covered jumpsuit with mismatched light-up Christmas-bulb earrings.

Showrunner and writer Elizabeth Sarnoff wisely withholds any exposition dumps on these matters. Instead, viewers are plunged into the midst of Kay’s exploding extended family and must keep their own eyes peeled for clues. Scarpetta weaves back and forth between two storylines: the present-day investigation and scenes of the younger Kay (a riveting Rosy McEwen) pursuing that early, career-making case. The often-comic tumult in the present-day Scarpetta household at first seems unconnected to Kay’s work. But Pete, the detective she worked with in the first investigation (the younger Pete is played by Jake Cannavale, Bobby’s son), ended up marrying Dot, and Kay herself married Benton, the FBI agent assigned to help them back in the day. As the two stories unfold, it becomes clear how closely linked they are, and how the mistakes, lies, and secrets from the past have shaped the crimes of the present.

Scarpetta can glide adeptly from humor to pathos and back. Lucy—a sorceress with computers—copes with the death of her beloved wife, Janet, by spend most of her day talking to an A.I. replicant of the dead woman on a screen, much to the dismay of her mother. Pete, now retired, is supposed to be jollying Lucy out of this routine by assisting her with starting a detective agency. Instead, Kay enlists Pete to help her solve the present-day murders because she doesn’t trust the assistant assigned to her by an old rival. Pete and Kay’s partnership is undeniably effective, but they have the irritable camaraderie of an old married couple. From the past storyline, we can see that she has been briskly correcting his Neanderthal notions for decades. Meanwhile, Dot is furious that Pete has backburnered the detective-agency plan at the crook of a finger from Kay. For his part, Benton, working on a related case for the feds, is obliged to withhold information that might help their investigation and ease Kay’s fears, and he knows she’ll be furious about this when she finds out.

The detective whose obsession with work ravages her personal life is another of those TV clichés, but rarely is a sleuth’s domestic turmoil as compelling to viewers as the crime. Scarpetta might be the first series in which the detective’s home life steals the show from the investigation. Kidman, Curtis, Cannavale, and Baker spin screwball energy out of Sarnoff’s well-honed dialogue, and if it’s impossible to believe in Kidman as an Italian American, her bickering with Curtis nevertheless has the ring of sisterly authenticity as it escalates from zero to 60 in a matter of seconds. Scarpetta also lingers over more quietly funny character moments, as when the young Pete, driving around, tailing a suspect, soulfully sings along when the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady” comes on the car radio.

If Scarpetta has a flaw, it’s that the identification of the killer feels like a bit of an afterthought. All the mysteries surrounding that mystery—the undercurrents in Kay’s family and the way the past haunts its members—have become much more intriguing. Or is this a flaw? In a genre rife with shopworn tropes, it’s the detective series that captivates while breaking the mold that is the most worth celebrating.