‘Scarpetta’ Review: Nicole Kidman’s Detective Series Is Equal Parts Forensic Thriller and Dysfunctional Family Comedy

Nicole Kidman’s career is a curious one—strange might actually be the better word. Over the years, the actress carved out a niche as a sort of elegant, faintly icy diva of prestige cinema, the kind of performer filmmakers call when they need a dose of glamour and cultivated refinement. Films like The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Moulin Rouge! (2001), The Hours (2002), Dogville (2003), Birth (2004), and many others benefited from the presence of an actress capable of combining emotion with distance, empathy with coolness, beauty with a touch of mystery.

At some point in her career—quite logically, given the state of the market and the kinds of roles available in each medium—Kidman shifted her attention largely to streaming series. But instead of occupying the same rarefied prestige space she had cultivated in film, she has tended to gravitate toward more commercial fare: traditional, sometimes pulpy crime stories, the kind she rarely did on the big screen. Hence appearances in series like Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and Special Ops: Lioness. With the exception of the first—popular and Emmy-winning though hardly a canonical classic—these shows haven’t exactly left a lasting mark. It’s as if the streaming world allows Kidman to indulge a slightly more accessible, more populist side of herself.

Scarpetta continues along that path. Adapted from the long-running series of—so far—29 novels by Patricia Cornwell centered on forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, the show clearly positions itself as the starting point of a character Kidman could inhabit for years to come. Created by Liz Sarnoff and with several episodes directed by David Gordon Green, the first season leans toward a format closer to old-school network television than to the “prestige TV” model that has dominated the past couple of decades. Its glossy surface—much like its star-studded cast, which includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, Ariana DeBose, and Simon Baker—can be misleading. At heart, the show feels closer to the “beach read” side of Cornwell’s novels than to anything more elevated.

That said, Scarpetta is a strange show—odd in ways both intentional and accidental. Whenever the focus is on the cases investigated by the forensic doctor, often with the help of former police detective Pete Marino (Cannavale), the series functions in fairly traditional fashion. A mutilated body leads Scarpetta to suspect a connection with a case that made her famous 28 years earlier. The dual timeline allows Sarnoff to set half the story in the late 1990s, with a younger Scarpetta (played in those scenes by Rosy McEwen) and younger versions of the supporting characters. The device works well enough as a kind of built-in origin story for the ensemble.

Things get weirder once the focus shifts to Scarpetta’s personal and family life. Those threads intersect with her professional world through Marino—who here is also her brother-in-law—and her husband Benton Wesley (Baker), an FBI agent who occasionally crosses paths with her cases. The strongest link to this domestic universe is Dorothy (Curtis), Kay’s older sister, an intense, borderline unhinged woman with whom she shares a long history of resentment and misunderstandings. Dorothy has a daughter, Lucy (DeBose), a widowed computer expert who helps her aunt with investigations. Every family scene among the Scarpettas feels as though it wandered in from an Italian-American sitcom, with poor Kay stuck trying to manage a crowd of loud, demanding relatives who never seem to stop yelling.

One small clarification: the Scarpettas are supposed to be Italian-American. They cook pasta constantly, drink espresso by the gallon, and talk at full volume about everything. Yet, unlike in the books, Kay seems oddly detached from that world. Partly because she’s more methodical and composed—but also because, in Kidman’s hands, she looks about as Italian as a Scandinavian ghost. One understands that Prime Video might need a star of her caliber to get the show financed, but the casting is at the very least a risky proposition. It’s easy to picture someone like Marisa Tomei, Annabella Sciorra, or Edie Falco in the role; the almost translucent Kidman, less so.

That’s hardly the only change the show makes to the books—there are plenty—but fidelity isn’t really the issue here. After all, we’re not dealing with an untouchable masterpiece of literature. What’s puzzling is the show’s wavering tone and dramatic inconsistency. It’s never quite clear what Scarpetta wants to be. Does it imagine itself as prestige television without realizing it isn’t? Or is it aiming for some strange hybrid of giallo thriller and commedia all’italiana, an unusual mix for an Amazon series? Should we take it seriously—or watch it with the understanding that it’s all a bit ridiculous?

Nowhere is that confusion more visible than in Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance. In recent years the actress has approached many roles as an excuse to go gleefully over the top, and here she takes that impulse to new extremes. Her wardrobe, makeup, speech patterns, and general treatment of other characters push the limits of credibility so far that she becomes simultaneously the show’s most disastrous and most fascinating element. It’s hard to believe no one told Curtis to dial it back; every time she appears on screen, it feels as though something might explode. Even Kidman—usually the calm center of the show—often looks as if she’s exhausted by both the character and the actress. Strangely enough, though, it works. Dorothy is almost as unbearable as Curtis herself has lately become in front of the camera.

Add to that a few additional oddities: DeBose’s character constantly chats online with an AI version of her deceased wife, who appears onscreen embodied by a real actress; Kidman’s Scarpetta handles corpses with a surprisingly aggressive touch; and Cannavale’s son, Jacob Lumet Cannavale, plays the younger version of his father despite the two bearing only the faintest resemblance beyond a vague Italian accent. All of this unfolds alongside the supposedly serious investigation into whether the present-day killer might be the same one Scarpetta pursued in the 1990s.

By the midpoint of the season, the whodunit barely matters. What viewers will likely be waiting for is the next bizarre development in the parallel sitcom unfolding among the Scarpettas—something like an Everybody Hates Dorothy. And all of it takes place amid decomposing corpses that inadvertently reveal their secrets.

Dario Argento would be proud.