.png)
2 hours ago
1
Scarpetta has been a rather long time in the making. Demi Moore was attached to the role of Patricia Cornwell’s crack forensic pathologist in the 90s, as was Angelina Jolie in the 00s. In a recent interview, the author said she had even approached Jodie Foster and Helen Mirren along the way. Now it has finally come to our screens, thanks in part to Jamie Lee Curtis, who is both an executive producer and one of its stars, with Nicole Kidman in the title role, continuing her run as TV’s hardest-working A-lister. What a shame, then, after such a long wait, that it is so dire: a boilerplate mess that insists on stripping the original work for parts and putting a cynical techy spin on proceedings to boot.
There are – for no good reason, really – two timelines in the series. In the present, Kidman plays Virginia’s chief medical officer Kay Scarpetta – a little icy, professional but prone to overstepping, haunted by secrets from the past. She is called to a crime scene where a woman’s naked body – sans hands – has been bound together with rope. We flash back to the 90s, where young Scarpetta (Rosy McEwen) is on the trail of a similar killer, who leaves a strange, glittery residue on his victims. Initially, at least, it seems as though this could be an interesting proposition, despite all the to-ing and fro-ing between past and present, which wasn’t part of Cornwell’s original novel. The idea that Scarpetta and her colleague and brother-in-law Pete Marino (played by Bobby Cannavale) may have got the wrong man in the 90s – when DNA evidence was still in its infancy – could have been the basis for a smart whodunnit. Instead, we get a sluggish procedural that barely bothers to build tension. Moments of gore come out of left field; major revelations in the case come to Scarpetta as sudden, deus ex machina revelations; and the dead women are mere plot fodder in a way that feels positively retro and grubby. The tone is strange – sometimes it’s The Silence of the Lambs, sometimes Diagnosis: Murder.
But there is worse to come. Because Scarpetta also insists on updating its source material to include – yes, really – an AI chatbot as one of its main characters. Janet (Janet Montgomery) is the dead wife of Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy (Ariana DeBose). There’s a kind of sub-Black Mirror B-plot about their relationship, which gets repetitive rather quickly. But hey, if you’ve ever wanted to see Jamie Lee Curtis – who plays Lucy’s mum, Dorothy – have a heart-to-heart with a computer screen then Scarpetta is the place to be. See also: a shoehorned storyline about a company that 3D prints bodily organs, which culminates in the death of a group of astronauts. It feels as though no one involved had enough conviction in the source material, and the sense that Scarpetta is fighting a misogynistic department – as in Cornwell’s novel – can roughly be boiled down to her asking Marino not to use words such as “bitch” in her presence.
Kidman and Curtis have terrific chemistry, and they clearly have good fun as warring siblings whose childhood animosity has bubbled over into adult hostility. But, really, their scenes could have come from any half-decent drama, and they alone cannot save Scarpetta. McEwen, too, tries her best, but it’s difficult to get a sense of who our protagonist is, away from the professional and personal traumas that have shaped her (in a slightly inelegant flashback further into the past, we learn that her father was murdered in front of her at his grocery store).
Scarpetta is undoubtedly the apex of Prestige Trash. Time was, a show with this many big names would have had to have been half decent – now it’s fine to merely add on more and more silliness, stretching what could have been a tight four-parter into eight increasingly weird episodes. Would a smart, lightly modernised adaptation have felt too staid for the powers that be? The trend of falling back on existing IP feels tired, but Scarpetta highlights the danger of trying way too hard.
Scarpetta is on Prime Video now.
