This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.
TV Series
”Scarpetta”
Series creator: Elizabeth Sarnoff
Directors: Charlotte Brändström, David Gordon Green
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana DeBose, Bobby Cannavale and others. Length: 8 episodes x approx. 50 min. Language: English
Premiere on Prime Video March 11
Fans of Patricia Cornwell’s crime novels have long awaited an adaptation of the sharp forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta’s brutal fight with serial killers and other murderous madmen. After 30 years and nearly as many books, the first adaptation has finally arrived, with stars Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis both producing and starring as sisters Kay and Dorothy Scarpetta. The series is already generating buzz as a major streaming event.
Series creator Elizabeth Sarnoff (“Lost,” “Marco Polo”)’s perform jumps between different timelines, primarily the late 1990s when Kay Scarpetta is new to the job and the present day when she returns to the same work.
Someone has begun murdering women in the same elaborate way as 28 years ago, and the protagonist suspects that she and the police may have caught the wrong perpetrator. While not an original premise, the execution aims to balance reason and emotion. “Scarpetta,” however, unfortunately lacks the former and attempts to compensate with more of the latter, primarily through the family chaos surrounding the criminal intrigue.
The sibling rivalry between Kidman and Curtis’ characters is initially somewhat entertaining—after all, two greats are colliding—but in the long run, it drains the energy from both me and the script. Sarnoff may be trying to capitalize on the success of Kate Winslet’s “Mare of Easttown,” by building a credible socio-psychological environment for Scarpetta to operate in, but the result unfortunately smells more like soap opera than drama. At times, it almost feels like a sitcom.
All the tonal shifts create a slight mental whiplash, and the confusion is not lessened by the creators topping it off with Russian agents, dead astronauts, a silly AI wife, and artificial human organs starting to rain from the sky when a space lab crashes to earth.
Perhaps it is the unruly plot that has led Sarnoff and the directors (including Swedish Charlotte Brändström) to tell with capital letters, frequently having the characters exchange information-heavy lines that are actually directed at us, the audience. As in the scenes where 90s-Scarpetta (who is woke long before the term was coined) lectures those around her who express offensive remarks about minorities. Correctly acted, but delivered with a stressful, overbearing self-righteousness.
Well, at its core, there is still a clear desire to highlight the unfortunately always relevant societal trauma of men’s violence against women. So far, so fine. Less sympathetic is the fact that at the same time, it reproduces popular culture’s violence against the same segment of the population. In the 1990s, when this series’ source material was written, the genre’s favorite victim was young women who were slaughtered in the most bestial ways—a fiction’s fetishism that felt sleazy long before it ended up on quality thriller’s trash heap.
The last decades’ struggle for gender equality has been reflected in the contents of the body bags (if that is something to rejoice about), but here we are once again standing ankle-deep in the blood of naked and mutilated girls, speculatively exposed as in an antiquated horror cabinet.
Time has therefore passed Patricia Cornwell by. One might think. But then the gaze falls on Netflix’s upcoming Jo Nesbø adaptation, and one can sense that the misogynistic serial killer has been given a second (third?) wind.
