Corpses, spacelabs and gravy: The utter disaster of Nicole Kidman’s Scarpetta

In Cornwell’s books, Scarpetta is a resourceful Italian American chief medical officer in Virginia. Her long-term sidekick is ex-beat cop Pete Marino, and she’s helped out by her genius hacker niece Lucy, and her long-term lover/husband Benton Wesley of the FBI. There’s also Kay’s sister Dot, Lucy’s neglectful mother, now conveniently married to Marino.  

This rag-tag family is key to the books. So are Scarpetta’s roots. And here’s the biggest problem with this adaptation: when you think of mouthy Italian-Americans; Kidman is not usually up there with Marisa Tomei, Cher and Lorraine Bracco. When she promises a meal of “gravy” and then serves up a huge bowl of sauceless spaghetti, it’s a crime to rank with any in GoodFellas or The Sopranos.

Scarpetta cannot overcome this lack of casting credibility but is weighed down too by a belaboured script and a clumsy double timeline. The show boomerangs between Scarpetta’s first case and the present day; each main cast member is played by two actors. Pete Marino is Bobby Cannavale in one timeline and his son Jake Cannavale in the other. You wonder if the whole double-cast idea was invented to give more work to the Cannavale family.

It makes for clunky exposition. Scarpetta tells Wesley (played by Simon Baker of The Mentalist) “My first big case, the one I built my whole career on, my reputation, everything. You know as well as I do, I can’t be wrong.” In a weird accent that’s deep south USA crossed with Australian, he whispers back: “It’s gonna be okay, you got the right guy”. But Scarpetta’s production team have got the wrong guys, and it is not gonna be okay.

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The whole cast is conveniently living in Wesley’s plantation-like ancestral home. There is ridiculous wealth on show, and together they have world-class expertise in forensics, AI, drones, skin grafts and murders on spaceships (I am not being facetious). But despite having a huge home, they still walk in on one another having sex, or in the shower. They have screaming arguments. They do not seem to have a housekeeper or a panic room.

Dot is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has taken her frenzied role on The Bear and, as her husband Christopher Guest would say, turn it up to 11. Kidman and Cannavale are over the top without any real chemistry.  Memorable lines about loud sex include: “We are consenting adults and we are married, so we can do whatever we want.”

The writing and performances lack warmth, humour and joy to counterbalance the gruesome rapes and murders it shows. Everything about Scarpetta is exploitative: the posing of the bodies, the lingering naked shots of corpses in the morgue, the close-ups of Kay “cutting in the cooler.” It is gratuitous yet simultaneously dull.  

You would be thrown out of a rookie screenwriting class for some of the tropes here: establishing Scarpetta’s intelligence by having her wear glasses, demonstrating her feminist ideals by telling Marino “could you not refer to women as bitches?” There is a silly MO involving a crushed penny and the ricocheting between Cannavalle Jr and Cannavalle Sr feels pointless.

Scarpetta is presumably aimed at an audience used to bingeing nostalgic crime shows. It is as subtle as a brick phone. The recent Harlen Corben Netflix shows are outrageous and unrealistic, but at least understand tension. Cross, Bosch, and even The Lincoln Lawyer do it better, because there is chemistry between the characters, there is dark humour, there is curiosity.

Scarpetta has none of this. Its 30-year-old beefs between characters deliver zero jeopardy. Its attempts to cram three decades into seven hours makes a coherent plot impossible.

I fell asleep in episode six and was woken up by a spacelab crashing into a field, covering it with organs grown from stem cells. I had to rewatch the episode because I thought I had dreamed it. That it made more sense than much of the previous five hours is a fitting post mortem for Scarpetta.

Scarpetta is streaming on Prime. Jamie Klingler is the founder of London Book Club