In many ways, Patricia Cornwell’s novels were ahead of their time. That’s why I ate up a bunch of them as a teenager. A generation before CSI: became a TV sensation, her books’ heroine, Kay Scarpetta, solved crimes in a lab instead of chasing bad guys down dark alleys. Before most crime novels even acknowledged the existence of gay characters, Kay’s computer-genius niece Lucy was her right hand. The other core character was Pete Marino, a former NYPD homicide detective with the street smarts to complement their book smarts and a guy who would chase those bad guys when they went down dark alleys.
In time, I came to realize the rut that they were in. Marino was always just about to fall apart, Lucy was always angry and making disastrous choices with women, and Kay was too wedded to her work and emotionally closed off. (Evidently, Cornwell has made major changes to the format of the books in recent years.) Rumors of a big-screen adaptation have been floating around Hollywood for decades, and they have borne no fruit until now with Scarpetta, an Amazon miniseries featuring three Oscar winners in its cast. And it sucks! How’d that happen? As the oldsters used to say about TV, don’t touch that dial.
The show operates on two timelines: In 1998, Kay (Rosy McEwen) becomes Virginia’s first female chief medical examiner, and her first major case involves bringing down a serial killer who rapes, tortures, and murders educated women with high-powered jobs. In the present day, the doctor (Nicole Kidman) reassumes her former position after some years in Boston with her husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley (Simon Baker). She lives in his family’s mansion in Alexandria, which is suddenly crowded, because Lucy (Ariana DeBose) has moved in after the death of her wife, and Kay’s sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis) has married Marino (Bobby Cannavale) and also moved in because of renovations to their house. In this state, Kay finds another murder similar to the ones in her first case, with evidence pointing to a suspect who was cleared.
Curtis gives a grotesquely bad performance. To be sure, some of the problems here are with the conception of the character, but her idea of playing an Italian American is to be as loud and annoying as possible. You don’t have to look far to see what’s wrong here, as Cannavale knows exactly how hard to push with the world-weary, hot-tempered Marino. He has also passed that same quality down to his real-life son, Jacob Lumet Cannavale, who portrays the younger version of Marino in the 1990s. Next to them, Curtis comes off like a cartoon.
She may be the biggest issue, but she’s far from the only one. The central murder mystery keeps going up blind alleys, and the flashbacks to the killer stripping his victims naked and hogtying them feel exploitative. They’re too reminiscent of Crossing Jordan, which showrunner Liz Sarnoff worked on. Remember that show? I do, unfortunately.
For a procedural, this program doesn’t offer much procedure. Instead, it gives us way too much of Lucy’s conversations with an AI-generated image of her wife (Janet Montgomery), when we could be following her new romance with a beat cop (Tiya Sircar) that takes a toxic turn.
It’s not all bad: The series does take flight in Episode 5, when a spaceship crashes in Virginia and the dead astronauts on board are connected to the serial killings. Kay’s investigation of their murders effectively turns the show into The X-Files, and the episode has a nice self-aware flashback when young Kay takes little Lucy (Savannah Lumar) to see the 1998 movie version of the sci-fi show. Episode 6 shows little Benton (Easton Ginn Almond) being diagnosed as a sociopath, which immediately makes him more interesting than his counterpart in the print version. The last of the season’s eight episodes gives DeBose a fine moment when Lucy finally explodes at her mother and her aunt for taking her for granted because they’re so busy with their own baggage. The only thing that would have made that more gratifying is if it had come earlier in the show.
If the central murder mystery had worked, maybe the show could have been salvaged. Alas, the killer turns out to be one of those peripheral characters whom we’re purposely kept in the dark about, which is such a cliché for stories like this. It’s neat that Kay’s alone in her house for the killer to move in on her because her issues have driven everyone else away, but the cliffhanger ending to the season totally doesn’t work. The Emmy-winning Sarnoff leaves too many loose threads dangling, and the character bits don’t begin to make up for it. Kay Scarpetta herself would be outraged at how thoroughly this job has been botched.
