Kay Scarpetta, Melodrama Examiner: My No-Spoiler Review of Scarpetta

What: Scarpetta
Type: 8 Episode Series
On: Amazon Prime
Note: If you love the books, lock them in your heart cause this is nothing like them.
Should You Watch: Do you like messy shows? If so, yes. If not, skip and read the books.

Rating: 2 dull scalpels 2 / 5

Cue my best Tyra Banks - “I was rooting for you! We were ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!”

Patricia Cornwell’s massive thriller series with Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is a staple of thriller writing, and she is an icon in the female mystery writer world. On top of that, Cornwell worked as a technical writer in the Medical Examiner’s office in my hometown - Richmond, VA - and by RVA readers she is much beloved. Add that with the fact I am a huge Nicole Kidman fan you get the excitement I felt approaching the release of this show. I even had the release date on my calendar.

Sadly, instead of the tight, thoughtful drama I thought this might produce, it turned out to be a confusing mess of tropes and emotions that would embarrass a telenovela. I stopped watching it twice before deciding to power through it on a thread of hope it would get better. It didn’t. So here’s my postmortem.

The decision and writing of this show reflects a baffling series of choices. Instead of just filming the first novel (which has enough kills and crime to sustain a show), they merge the 1st novel and the 25th novel into a jumbled mess. Trying to have their cake and eat it too - we see young Kay Scarpetta solving her first case, and older Kay Scarpetta (played by Kidman) solving a copycat which threatens to “tarnish” her legacy from the first case.

The series inelegantly flips back and forth between the two timelines to the point where you aren’t sure where you are. It also makes it very hard to connect to any character because before you can attach to their young idealistic exuberance, you see how bitter, worn, and hopeless they’ve become. It swaps the story of the highly dedicated and clinical Kay Scarpetta providing procedural justice for an extensive load of cliche laden family and personal drama that drains the central mystery and just makes you want to comfort eat.

Kidman is fine as Scarpetta but the script offers her two emotions - sad and irritated - and there’s not a lot of places to go with that. The younger version, played well by Rosy McEwen, only gets to feel overwhelmed and crunchy as she navigates her case. Their acting is great considering the poor writing of the show. Bobby Cannavale (whose younger self is played by his son) turns in the best performance of the series.

Easily the worst performance is Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, Kay’s whacky sister. Curtis eats every piece of scenery in the room and instead of being the “we have conflict because we are different but we love because we’re sisters” vibe of the book, Curtis plays Dorothy as a screaming, snide, angry primadonna who has no chemistry with anyone, especially her daughter - tech genius Lucy - and starts and ends every scene mad. There’s no subtlety and little reason to accept she and Kay are related in any way. The only believable thing in the show is that Lucy can’t stand to be around Dorothy, and that we understand.

By the later episodes, the series gets lost in subplots and drifts so far from its procedural roots that it begins to feel like an entirely different genre wandered in and refused to leave

The series tries to be centered around the topic of loss, but the only thing to grieve is how very far this confusing, grim-toned mess is from anything we wanted it to be. Put a penny on the railroad tracks - this show is DOA.