Come for the forensics, stay for the bickering. Or not.
Admittedly, Season One of Scarpetta – yes, they're already at work on the next – proved to be more of a slog than expected from a serial killer thriller that spans two eras of its main characters' lives and careers.
Based on Patricia Cornwell's bestselling books about its brilliant titular forensic pathologist, Scarpetta stars Nicole Kidman as Dr Kay Scarpetta in the present day, while her younger self is played by The Alienist's Rosy McEwen.
The premise of this debut season draws from two books in the series: 1990's Postmortem for the "past" sequences, and 2021's Autopsy for the "present". Not being familiar with Cornwell's work, I just strapped in for whatever ride Lost veteran Liz Sarnoff, the showrunner here, had prepared for us.
And promptly unstrapped after the second episode.
To be sure, Scarpetta has a top-shelf cast and some astute casting. Jamie Lee Curtis is on board as Kay's, erm, vivacious older sister Dorothy, with The Mentalist's Amanda Righetti playing the younger Dot.
The Mentalist himself, Simon Baker, plays Kay's FBI profiler husband Benton Wesley, with Weeds' Hunter Parrish as his junior incarnation.
And then we have Bobby Cannavale (whose multitude of credits includes Ant-Man, Third Watch, Will & Grace and Boardwalk Empire) as Dorothy's present-day husband, ex-cop Pete Marino, who worked with Kay on the "past" storyline case. Stunt casting alert: the younger Pete is played by Cannavale's son, actor-musician Jacob.
Rounding out the principal cross-time cast are Ariana DeBose (multiple award-winner for Spielberg's West Side Story) as Dorothy's computer-whiz daughter Lucy in the present, with 13-year-old Savannah Lumar in the role on the other end of the series' timeline.
Basically, Kay and Pete (with some help from Benton) brought down a nasty killer back then; yet, 28 years later, a murder victim found in exactly the same circumstances makes them question whether or not they got the right suspect back then.
To compound the situation, Kay is now answerable to the petty bureaucrat whose toes she trod on in the past. (Actually, "crushed with steel-soled boots" would be more appropriate.)
Again, not sure how all this stuff played out in prose form, but the biggest obstacle to my progress watching Scarpetta was all that bickering. It's like that awkward, hurtful family quarrel all of us would like to forget, regurgitated and played out over and over again almost incessantly throughout the first and second episodes.
Is it the brokenness and complications of all the relationships in Kay's sphere that add to the appeal of the books? On the screen, though, to someone totally new to the Scarpettaverse, it really gets in the way of the case, or cases, at hand.
Kay fights with Dorothy, who fights with Pete over his tangled past with her sister. Benton gets caught in the crossfire and tries to stay above it all, but we gradually learn that he has a rather dark side too, and (seemingly) unreasonable expectations of Kay.
Lucy snaps at everyone, apparently still hurting from the death of her wife Janet (played by Janet Montgomery, mostly as an AI recreation who converses with Lucy and the rest of the family) and long-harboured resentment towards Kay (who raised her) and Dorothy (who seemingly abandoned her to run off with a man).
Threaded between all this squabbling are the delicate strands of the show's mystery, with the resolutions of both the past and current aspects of the case left to the eighth and final episode of the season to keep us guessing till the end.
The laudable cast makes the frequent intercutting between timelines seamless, with both sets of actors doing a tremendous job of complementing each other (the Curtis-Righetti combo scores a little higher than the Kidman-McEwen pairing IMHO).
Meanwhile, the enigma of each era is similarly compelling, with one mystery literally falling from the sky in a startling and spectacular present-day moment.
It's just that the volatile character dynamics and politicking get terribly distracting, although the 10-day cooling off period before I went back to finish the series helped a lot.
If there's one encouraging takeaway from this debut, it's that so much of the suppressed lies and misdemeanours of the principal characters have burst to the surface, so the next season can hopefully relegate the family feuding to the back seat and focus on whatever mystery Sarnoff intends to adapt next. Erm, pretty please?
All eight episodes of Scarpetta Season One are available on Prime Video.
Summary:
Blood is thicker when we bicker.
