After many attempts and untold dollars spent, “Scarpetta” finally gives Nicole Kidman a prestige TV show in which she does not appear to have been airlifted in from another continent, planet or medium.
Kidman’s regal bearing and reserve always play better on a bigger screen and within grander scenarios. On TV, she tends to stand out, or apart, from the other cast members playing mere mortals.
It’s why Kidman’s best TV role before the new Prime Video series was as a charismatic guru on Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers.” And why you couldn’t figure out how her character became part of the coffee gaggle on HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” or how her character in “The Undoing” was so clueless when Kidman herself always radiates intelligence.
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, protagonist of a series of crime novels by Patricia Cornwell that started in the 1990s — and precursor to complex screen characters including Olivia Benson and Carrie Mathison — also stands apart as the first female chief medical officer of Virginia, and as a woman who makes questionable personal choices but maintains a singular focus when solving crimes.
Kidman and her resting determined face slip into the role of Kay like it is PPE that “Scarpetta” showrunner Liz Sarnoff is holding out for her. The show starts with Kay, who had been living in Boston with her FBI profiler husband, Benton (a solid Simon Baker), having just returned to Virginia to reassume the medical examiner job she first held 25 years before.
Kay smokes cigarettes and obsesses over a recent killing that evokes her most famous case from years past. She lives in Benton’s family mansion along with her loud, flaky, much-married sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), Dorothy’s husband, ex-police Detective Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale) and Dorothy’s computer whiz daughter, Lucy (Ariana DeBose).
Pete and Dorothy’s stay is temporary, but Lucy was practically raised by Kay and is part of the household. Everything about this setup — from Kay’s comfort with Pete, with whom she worked on many cases, her discomfort with her boisterous sister, to the lived-in, wallpaper-heavy elegance of the mansion — plays as believable.
That’s partially because Cannavale and Curtis, who run warm to hot, seemingly refuse to let Kidman maintain her natural cool. Curtis, especially, seems determined to engage Kidman in moments that seem improvised, like an exchange of verbal blows between the siblings in which Kay actually gets in some shots. They are less venomous or enthusiastic than her adversary’s, but that could reflect Kay’s weariness from lifelong battles with her sister.
Curtis at first seems to channel her mom character from “The Bear.” Only Dorothy starts out at fish No. 7 and volume knob 11. But a touching, if unlikely, scene between Dorothy and her late daughter-in-law’s AI avatar (you read that correctly) puts things in a calmer context.
“Scarpetta” takes a gamble by having Lucy speak regularly to Janet, her late spouse, on a screen via AI technology. What could easily have seemed ridiculous instead plays as heartbreaking, as DeBose combines Lucy’s wonder at communicating with her lost love with a growing awareness that this behavior is unhealthy.
Having successfully presented the most touching relationship between person and object since Tom Hanks and the volleyball in “Cast Away,” “Scarpetta” pushes its luck by having Dorothy converse with the AI as well. But Dorothy grows softer and more relatable when Janet compliments Dorothy on the children’s books she wrote — books that her daughter, bitter over her mother’s frequent absences from her life, never read. Even as AI Janet’s detailed praise evokes the duplicitous hive mind from “Pluribus,” the obvious craving for acceptance that Curtis lends Dorothy makes the character far more sympathetic.
Kidman’s performance gets its biggest assist from Rosy McEwen, who plays the younger Kay during her first round as medical examiner. An English actor who was a quiet revelation in the 2022 film “Blue Jean,” McEwen closely resembles Kidman and seems to have studied her mannerisms. At one point, McEwen braces herself and stares into the middle distance as if taking a moment to think — a move you did not realize was a Kidman signature until someone else did it.
McEwen is in the show a lot, as flashbacks do most of the heavy lifting in developing the character of Kay. McEwen helps create what becomes a clear throughline from the similarly single-minded but younger, more trusting Kay to Kidman’s life-hardened yet quiet luxury-embracing iteration. Although Kidman’s performance and the show as a whole falter a bit in the final episodes, McEwen never does.
Family and colleague interactions and clever dialogue engage more than the crime-solving aspects of “Scarpetta,” partly because gratuitous shots of nude female corpses cheapen that aspect of the show.
But action-oriented scenes have their merits, like the compelling, unusual shots devised by the series’ primary director, David Gordon Green, a film and TV veteran who made the most recent “Halloween” movies with Curtis.
The investigative scenes also spotlight the intriguing mix of smarts, volatility and kindness Cannavale brings to Pete, who is retired before Kay brings him back as a special investigator. Cannavale’s expert delivery also helps sell Pete’s would-be throwaway comic lines.Cannavale’s real-life son, Jake Cannavale, plays the younger Pete. Although he looks like his dad, Jake Cannavale is burdened with playing an arc far less appealing than Kay’s.The Pete who first worked with Kay 25 years ago was a sexist homophobe who used slurs.
Although you can understand Sarnoff’s instinct to want to show the poisonous 1990s atmosphere in which Kay came up, some things are much better left in the past than uttered in a 2026 show. When Jake Cannavale delivers a line about how a rape victim might have encouraged her attacker by dressing provocatively, the actor looks like he cannot believe what he is saying. Neither can we.
“Scarpetta” premieres Wednesday on Prime Video.
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