Kay Scarpetta has been biding her time for 36 years.
Since she was introduced in Patricia Cornwell’s novel “Postmortem” in 1990, a succession of female medical examiners has beaten her to the screen: Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh (Jill Hennessy in “Crossing Jordan”), Dr. Camille Saroyan (Tamara Taylor in “Bones”), Dr. Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander in “Rizzoli & Isles”), Dr. Megan Hunt (Dana Delany in “Body of Proof”), to name a few. All of them operated in Scarpetta’s shadow, while attempts to base films or shows on the original came and went.
So “Scarpetta,” a series whose eight-episode first season premieres Wednesday on Prime Video, is a major event for mystery fans. And the show has a cast whose cachet reflects that status, starting with Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Scarpetta’s older sister, Dorothy; Ariana DeBose as Dorothy’s daughter, Lucy; and Bobby Cannavale as Dorothy’s husband, the former detective Pete Marino.
Accuracy requires pointing out, however, that those actors are onscreen only half the time; during the other half, we watch an entirely separate and much less well known group. That the more anonymous cast figures in the more tolerable half of the show is just one of the odd things about this busy, jangling series.
“Scarpetta” had a lot of cooks, including Curtis, who initiated the project with Cornwell, and David Gordon Green, who directed or co-directed five episodes. But the first name in the credits is that of Liz Sarnoff, who developed the series and served as its showrunner. Sarnoff is a television veteran with roots in broadcast, as a writer and producer for “Crossing Jordan” (she has medical-examiner experience) and “Lost.”
And “Scarpetta” has a particular kind of broadcast-network vibe; it feels less like the usual streaming crime thriller than it does the violent, studiously outré shows the networks used to produce when they were feeling artsy, like NBC’s “Hannibal” or Fox’s “The Following” or “Prodigal Son.” One way in which it presents is as American giallo, with its surprising abundance of naked and bloody female corpses and a jaw-dropping final scene that puts an innocent sporting implement to deadly use. The formulas of the forensic procedural and the serial killer investigation may be rife, but they are partially obscured by the slickly produced physical and psychological mayhem.
The lurid atmosphere is somehow enhanced by the presence in a major role of an A.I. video companion, who may be the show’s only wholly appealing character. (The actress Janet Montgomery is fine in the part, though you have to wonder how long we will keep human-washing these roles.)
That sensationalistic texture is a major feature of the show, but its impact is secondary to that of the story’s structure. Cornwell has published 29 Scarpetta novels to date; rather than rely on one as the source of the first season, the series loosely adapts the serial-killer story of “Postmortem,” setting it in 1998, while adding a new present-day plot with connections to the earlier tale. (Some aspects of the contemporary plot appear to be drawn from the 2023 novel “Unnatural Death.”)
Kidman and the other more prominent actors play the characters in 2026 while the alternate cast — including Rosy McEwen as the young Scarpetta and Jacob Lumet Cannavale, Bobby’s son, as the young Marino — play them in 1998. The show cuts between the two tracks metronomically, giving them roughly equal time, and there is a lot of evidence to keep track of; cellphone checkers may find themselves lost pretty quickly.
What you can’t miss, however, is how the contemporary story has been conceived as histrionic soap opera. The five primary characters, including Scarpetta’s husband, the F.B.I. profiler Benton Wesley (Simon Baker), all live together in a squalling, sobbing, backbiting circus. Each nurses a defining trauma, seen in flashback — murdered father, domineering mother, dead wife — and wields it like a cudgel. It’s as if the characters from a Chekhov play had moved to 21st-century Virginia and left behind their manners, as well as Chekhov’s dialogue.
This is a losing battle for the actors, particularly Baker, who seems shellshocked, and Curtis, who spends most of her time yelling and is costumed like a cartoon elf with omnipresent cleavage. Kidman gets by, though her reined-in performance looks a lot like her other recent turns in streaming thrillers (“Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Perfect Couple”). The saving grace of these scenes is Bobby Cannavale, whose reactions to the chaos are disarmingly human.
The early timeline, by contrast, is rational and reasonably absorbing, a straightforward (if grisly) procedural mystery that is not insultingly silly by the standards of serial-killer drama. It seems likely that this has to do with its proximity to Cornwell’s original story. The young cast acquits itself well, and McEwen and Hunter Parrish, as the young Wesley, have a nice rapport.
After the copious ritualistic murders of women (condemned as misogynistic, yet feeling more than a little misogynistic in their presentation), and the disturbing outbursts of violence by nominally sympathetic characters, and the 3-D printing of human organs, the season ends on a gaping cliffhanger. Fans of gothic excess can strap in for Season 2, which has already been ordered.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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