Scarpetta review: Nicole Kidman brings Patricia Cornwell’s iconic character to the screen

For the past decade, Nicole Kidman has seldom let a twisty small-screen thriller or meaty drama, or combination of the two, escape her exacting gaze.

Since her 2017 efforts in both Big Little Lies and Top of the Lake, the Australian star’s gravitation towards TV roles has also seen The Undoing, Nine Perfect Strangers, Special Ops: Lionesses, Expats and The Perfect Couple join her resume. (Should The White Lotus ever have a character for her, she’d be one of the HBO hit’s easiest casting choices.)

You could dub the Oscar-winner’s recent television focus a case of practical magic – going where more meaningful parts are, given Hollywood’s diminishing big-screen opportunities for women over 40, and carving a rewarding niche in the process. Kidman leading Scarpetta has the aroma of inevitability, then.

Ending a 36-year wait

Playing a determined investigator in an episodic mystery series, and slipping into an iconic figure’s shoes as well, feels like a logical next step on a filmography that still delivers cinematic revelations (see: her astonishing performance in Babygirl, one of the finest of her career) but is eagerly and actively relishing its current TV skew.

There’s much that’s scented with the expected in Scarpetta, whether or not you’ve already enjoyed Kidman’s trademark knack for making distance magnetic, particularly in the face of chaos, and regardless of if you’re an avid reader of Patricia Cornwell’s 29-strong novel series about the US state of Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner, which has been lining bookshelves since 1990.

Incredibly, this is the first time that the character is gracing the screen, albeit not for lack of trying. In previous failed projects, Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie were candidates to wield Dr Kay Scarpetta’s scalpel.

As those prior attempts to adapt Cornwell’s bestsellers stalled, The X-Files’ Dana Scully and Bones’ Temperance Brennan helped fill the gap, giving television whip-smart and devoted forensics experts. While the pair likely owe Cornwell a debt, Scarpetta now finds itself following their path, and knows it to the point of namechecking Scully.

Cantankerous detectives, dead women, the past haunting the present, personal lives bleeding into professional spheres and vice versa: crime TV is made of these, too, such as the likes of Mare of Easttown, traces of which also waft through Scarpetta.

That Scarpetta has been commissioned for Prime Video – a platform that loves page-to-screen procedurals about complicated yet engaging investigators, plus shows that bear their heroes’ surnames like Bosch, Cross and Ballard – equally lingers.

For all of its recognisable components, however, the sense that Scarpetta sticks to the familiar thankfully never overpowers its highlights.

ScreenHub: How to make an Australian crime series

Still captivating on-screen

Kay has long been a compelling presence for readers, and achieves the same for viewers as Scarpetta unfurls its eight-episode first season – a second is already locked in – but those in her on-screen orbit don’t always agree.

When she’s woken in the middle of the night to attend a grisly crime scene, she has newly returned to a workplace that’s hardly welcoming her back. Scarpetta’s predecessor Elvin Reddy (Lenny Clarke, All Saints Day), a former colleague who is now her boss, is all fake smiles and strict instructions, as is her past and present secretary Maggie Cutbush (Stephanie Faracy, Nobody Wants This).

At home, Kay’s extroverted sister Dorothy Farinelli (Jamie Lee Curtis, Freakier Friday) is quick to bicker, especially about the latter’s grief-stricken computer-whiz daughter Lucy (Ariana DeBose, Love Hurts), who Scarpetta largely raised.

There’s also a palpable detachment in Kay’s marriage to her FBI profiler husband Benton Wesley (Simon Baker, The Narrow Road to the Deep North), leaving ex-cop Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale, Kidman’s Nine Perfect Strangers co-star), her former offsider and Dorothy’s current husband, as a rare unwavering ally.

Two Scarpettas, two excellent performances

Showrunner Liz Sarnoff, a veteran of Deadwood, Lost, The Leftovers and Barry, alongside the also forensics-centric Crossing Jordan, has made shrewd choices in casting and structure in finally getting Scarpetta in front of the lens.

The series’ ensemble is mostly impeccable, although Curtis’ fondness for going as big as possible, as similarly witnessed in The Bear and Ella McCay, is overemphasised. Not only do the bulk of the show’s high-profile talents shine, but so do the actors tasked with playing their younger guises.

Portraying Kay when she’s starting her initial, also-thorny stint as Chief Medical Examiner in 1998, Rosy McEwan (Black Mirror) apes Kidman’s physicality and mannerisms with perfection, and threatens to steal the series outright. Jake Cannavale (American Sports Story), son of Bobby, shares the role of Marino with aplomb.

McEwan, the younger Cannavale, and Hunter Parrish (The Other Black Girl), the youthful Benton, also feature courtesy of the decision to base Scarpetta on both early and later Cornwell novels – with the show weaving in her 1990 debut Postmortem and 2021’s Autopsy, the series’ 25th entry.

Watch the trailer

An engrossing character study

Kidman and McEwan could each anchor a take on Scarpetta alone, had the call been needed.

With her behind-the-camera team, which includes David Gordon Green (Curtis’ Halloween, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends helmer), Charlotte Brändström (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) and Ellen Kuras (Lee) making meticulous contributions as directors, Sarnoff connects her two Kays via the new murder’s links to her first big case. That’s a straightforward tactic, as is excavating trauma’s echoes; add them to the list of Scarpetta’s clear-to-spot conventions.

Still, confronting the fact that a medical examiner cutting open a corpse is perhaps the only thing that’s ever orderly in a crime’s wake – for the professionals pursuing justice and their loved ones, too – proves thoughtful and potent, especially with Kidman and McEwan giving it flesh.

Scarpetta saddles Kidman with plenty more to deal with, spanning family secrets, a space station, 3D-printed human organs, a potential cult and AI, with several such plot points verging on cartoonish even when they hail from Cornwell’s pen.

Can’t-put-down detective stories function best as gripping character studies, though – and when Scarpetta digs in, in both its late-1990s and mid-2020s segments, it’s the television equivalent of a page-turner.

Scarpetta is coming to Prime Video on 11 March.

Discover more screen, games & arts news and reviews on ScreenHub and ArtsHub. Sign up for our free ArtsHub and ScreenHub newsletters.