The medical examiner — most every procedural series has one, cutting into corpses, analyzing stomach contents, pointing out bullet holes and strange residues and the effects of blunt force trauma. As characters, they may be flamboyant and/or ironic in a way often denied to the central investigators, whom they are likely to find a little irritating.
Often they are fan favorites, like David McCallum’s Dr. Ducky Mallard on “NCIS,” Tamala Jones’ Dr. Lanie Parish on “Castle,” or Annette Badland’s Dr. Fleur Perkins on “Midsomer Murders.” But now and again the medical examiner will go beyond the job description to become the investigator — your Dr. Maura Isles, your Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh, and the grandpappy of them all, Jack Klugman’s “Quincy, M.E.” — leaving credential cops in the dust.
Which brings us to “Scarpetta,” premiering Wednesday on Prime Video and based on the novels of Patricia Cornwell — she has written a passel since 1990, though, surprisingly, this is the first time her Kay Scarpetta has made it to the screen. Kay, played by Nicole Kidman, is newly back in harness as the chief medical officer of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a job she’d held before being pushed out some unspecified years earlier. The series runs on parallel timelines, in the present day and 28 years earlier at the time of Kay’s “first big case, the one I build my whole career and reputation on” — a serial murder affair whose solution a new crop of murders is bringing into question.
Husband Benton Wesley (Simon Baker, of “The Mentalist” long ago), a Virginia native, wearing a Southern accent and suspenders, is also being sworn back into service as an FBI profiler. He has a lot of money and a big, big old house, which is currently also sheltering Kay’s sister, Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her husband, Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale), a former police detective who worked that First Big Case with Kay. (Their own house is being remodeled.)
Also living on the property, in a separate little cabin, is Dorothy ‘s daughter, Lucy (Ariana DeBose), a computer whiz — like the M.E., you can’t get by without one in modern police fiction — who has inchoate plans with Pete to open a private eye shop. More or less raised by the responsible Kay while Dorothy was off being wild and crazy, Lucy has a dead wife, Janet (Janet Montgomery), surviving as a fully embodied, essentially sentient, self-directed AI program, who looks back on the world through the computer screen where she “lives.” With the possible exception of Janet, they have all appeared in the novels, if not exactly in this exact form.
Bobby Cannavale plays Det. Pete Marino, who previously worked with Scarpetta, and Ariana DeBose is Lucy Watson, Scarpetta’s niece.
(Connie Chornuk / Prime)
Most everyone has some particular, complicated business with most everyone else — Kay and Dorothy, Dorothy and Pete, Kay and Pete, Kay and Benton, Kay and Lucy, Pete and Lucy, Pete and Benton, Dorothy and Lucy, Lucy and Janet, Dorothy and Janet — all explored at length, and more central to the series than who did what murders and why. “We will literally fight about anything,” says Kay as she and Dorothy argue about song lyrics and which one of them is the weirdo, and whether it bothers Kay that Dorothy is rich, while down a hill Lucy visits (real) Janet’s grave.
Just how they’ve spent the intervening decades isn’t quite clear; Kay and Benton have been “in Boston,” where they might have been “happier.” Lucy became rich before she was out of her teens, presumably through that computer wizardry. Dorothy has somehow become a fabulously successful author of children’s books, though nothing in her character suggests she could sit down long enough to write one; after a few marriages she has settled on Pete, satisfied to be a “kept man.” That will change when Kay makes him her quasi-official deputy (“How does forensic operations specialist sound?”), because “I am surrounded by vipers in that office and I need someone I can trust.”
“So many distractions in this case,” says (older) Kay, and she’s not kidding. Between the old case and the new, which can get mixed up in one’s head, and Kay’s investigation bumping up against Benton’s, the series is packed tighter with incidents than a Marx Brothers stateroom, including a pseudo-spiritual grief cult, 3D-printed human organs, a fallen space station, intra-office rivalry and crushes and, not to forget, murders. Developed by Liz Sarnoff, who co-created “Alcatraz” and has written for “Barry,” “Lost,” “Deadwood” and “Crossing Jordan” (featuring the above-mentioned medical examiner, Jordan Cavanaugh), it isn’t quite the romp that suggests, given that it’s all tackled with great seriousness, but it certainly is nutty.
Kidman’s props here are wire-rimmed glasses, to make her look like a doctor, and cigarettes, to emphasize inner turmoil, as we don’t see much outer. When the camera switches back and forth from her to Baker in close-up, between her porcelain features and his mid-fifties creases, or she’s riding along next to Cannavale, they seem to belong to different species entirely. There’s something remote about her performance, as well, which, to be sure, might be an acting choice, a function of her character, just as Curtis’ manic Dorothy might be of hers; if we want to get hypothetically analytical about it, we might assign their adult behavior to the childhood trauma of their father’s murder.
Though the sisters are supposedly first-generation Italian American, no whiff of the old country hangs about Kay; Dorothy will at least spit out a few words in Italian. But Jersey boy Pete, who manages to look exactly the same degree of unshaven from day to day, is paisan enough for them all. (It also means that in his younger incarnation, played by Cannavale’s son Jake Cannavale, he carries the burden of Neanderthal ideas about women and sexuality; he does grow up some in the 27-year interregnum.) Cannavale is the series’ MVP, grounding Kidman in their scenes and Curtis in theirs, and seeming, more than most of these characters, like a person you might meet in this life we call real. As younger Kay, Rosy McEwen carries the past-set scenes, and could support a series of her own.
There are some threads left loose along the way, to be tied up, or not, and a mysterious cliffhanger to be climbed back from, in the already scheduled second season.
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