Across parallel timelines, ‘Scarpetta’ is in the details

“Scarpetta,” from E1] adaptation finally came to fruition.

“I was interested in the fact that such an important literary character had never been brought to a screen,” Curtis says, speaking via a voice memo. “The amount of stories and books available lent itself to a template for a TV series. I went to my [producing] partner, Jason Blum, when I found out that the rights were available, which shocked me, and said to him that we should partner up and buy the rights to her books. It was as simple as that: I just felt like Kay Scarpetta needed to come to the screen.”

Curtis’ Comet Pictures and Blumhouse Television enlisted longtime TV writer Liz Sarnoff as the showrunner. Sarnoff had read all of Cornwell's books with her mom and had what she calls a “meaningful” connection to the series. Because there were so many novels, the first of which published in 1990, Sarnoff wanted to find a way to encapsulate the 1990s timelines from the early books alongside the more contemporary ones.

“In the 90s, there was no DNA, so everything had a slower pace and a more methodical way about it,” Sarnoff says. “Whereas now you get rapid DNA in a few minutes. I didn’t want to miss either of those two things. I started to think the best way to do this was to do two timelines, one where she is starting out in her first really big job and the other where she’s a bit older and she’s coming back to try to right the wrongs of the previous time.”

That will also allow Sarnoff to adapt two books per season — Season 2 is already in production. “I felt it was important that the show really move,” she says. “I wanted to be able to have big story leaps in each episode.” (Some spoilers for Season 1 follow.)

Season 1 is based on Cornwell's debut Scarpetta novel, “Postmortem,” and her 25th novel, 2021’s “Autopsy.” The conception meant that the show would need multiple actors playing Scarpetta, with one as the lead of the series. Kidman jumped at the opportunity after reading the pilot, coming onboard as the star and as an executive producer.

“My sister is a massive fan of all the books,” Kidman says. “She’s a big crime fan and she finds it very comforting. She said, “There's absolutely no question you must do this role.’ And I listen to my sister.”

McEwen, who shares an agent with Kidman, joined as the younger iteration of Scarpetta. “Not only do they bear an uncanny resemblance, but Rosy has very similar qualities to Nicole,” Sarnoff says. “She’s very porous. When you look in her eyes, you see everything. It’s fun to watch them both think.”

The actors had the opportunity to do substantial research in the month leading up to production in Nashville in October 2024. Kidman and McEwen worked with real-life forensic pathologist Dr. Amy Hawes to learn about the autopsy process, as well as the motivations for becoming a medical examiner.

“For me, what was important was getting trained for what happens when you hit a crime scene,” Kidman says. “How do you do an autopsy? What are you looking for? Why do you choose to become a medical examiner?”

The research helped lend authenticity to their roles.

“We wanted to understand the emotional turmoil of looking at dead bodies all day and what that does to you and what you bury and then what ends up coming through the cracks,” McEwen says. “We were by the book. We didn’t want anyone to see any holes in the process [or] any medical examiners to watch the show and say, ‘Oh, they'd never do that.’”

When it came to the character, Kidman felt the freedom to make it her own. She spoke to Cornwell ahead of filming and says the author told her, “There’s nothing you can do that’s wrong. You are her.”

“That was the most incredible thing,” Kidman says. “For someone who has created a person to say, ‘I can only see you now when I write.’ It was a massive passing of the baton because she owned her. Patricia was Kay. For her to go, ‘I'm going to give her to you and she belongs to you’ was a gift.”

The first season's plot is complexly wrought. In the past, Scarpetta and Det. Pete Marino (Jake Cannavale) are investigating a series of murders that seem to be perpetrated by a serial killer. As Scarpetta works tirelessly to elevate her career in a frustratingly male-dominated world, she also balances a complicated personal life that involves FBI agent and potential love interest Benton Wesley (Hunter Parrish), and her computer-savvy niece Lucy (Savannah Lumar).

In the present, Scarpetta and Benton, now married, return to their Virginia hometown, where the murder of a young woman seems to connect to her earlier case. Marino (Bobby Cannavale) has married Scarpetta’s sister Dorothy (Curtis), and the couple, along with Lucy (Ariana DeBose), are living on Scarpetta’s vast estate.

Cornwell read the scripts but allowed Sarnoff to make the story her own. One major alteration is how the death of Scarpetta’s father impacts her future career. In the series, she witnesses his murder as a young girl — a far more violent moment than in the novels, where he dies of cancer. The swap imbued the character with a more substantial motivation.

“She has the desire to be right and to right wrongs,” Kidman says. “And, ultimately, she makes mistakes that she wants to go and fix. She feels a very deep desire to seek control. It’s why she’s so quiet, determined and powerful. Kay is powerful, but she carries things in an interior way.”

“Sometimes you feel like to be powerful you want to puff up and be louder,” McEwen says. “But actually, as I was watching Nicole, I was like, ‘No, power is quiet. Power is stillness.’ I think she grows into that. I’m quick to react and be emotional, but actually having the strength to take a second to think how you're going to respond and then respond — that’s how she’s learned to make her way through this world.”

Both timelines were filmed simultaneously. The production took place in two-episode blocks and was primarily chronological, with directors David Gordon Green and Charlotte Brandstrém at the helm. The actors watched each others’ dailies and McEwen would sometimes sneak on set to watch Kidman in action. Having a few weeks of rehearsal ahead of filming helped McEwen and Kidman to establish the similarities in their performances, as did work with Kidman’s dialect coach.

“We're operating in different spheres, realms of her life, so it’s more about: What are the things that you still have as you've gotten older mannerism-wise?” Kidman says. “What are your emotional tics or the things that soothe you or that just come with who you are that actually never change? What has changed was up to me.”

“I had little movements I could pick up on that I was able to take from Nicole, which was really helpful,” McEwen adds. “But about a month in, I had to slightly release and run with everything that we'd put together and trust that she was there. I couldn't keep going back to the future because that’s not how you would exist. You have no idea what is going to happen to you in 30 years.”

“There’s an enormous amount of work that goes into it to then go, ‘OK, now I'm free,” Kidman adds. “You have to be incredibly studious and disciplined, and then you have to have the ability to be emotionally free and responding in the moment to what's going on.”

Sarnoff withheld the final episode from the cast during most of production, in part because she hadn't finalized the ending yet. By Episode 6, it became clear to Sarnoff how she wanted to conclude each timeline, including what the final shot would entail. The closing sequence, where Scarpetta is chased through her home by the murderer, was filmed on the final day of shooting. The reveal is completely unexpected. “You do need to watch very carefully for the clues,” Kidman says. “Nothing is not important.”

“It was important to me in Season 1 for Kay to come into the present day very ambitious, wanting to have it all,” Sarnoff explains. “And by the end of it, she’s just desolate. It’s a really bad scene. So I had to consider, ‘Who is the murderer and how is it a betrayal to her?’ Patricia’s books wrap up quickly. If you do that in a finale, it doesn’t work. People like a big, dramatic ending.”

The cliffhanger ending is jaw-droppingly intense, but there is also an emotional fallout for Scarpetta and her family. Dorothy and Marino have moved out, Scarpetta is separated from Benton and Lucy is on the outs with her aunt.

“What's great about this is that, yes, you have all the crime, but you also have the family,” Kidman says. “By the end, we're completely fractured and alone. So you have this emotional journey as a family that ends in wreckage.”

McEwen says what makes the show unique is its level of scientific detail and its humanity.

“It’s also so refreshing to see a woman whose life doesn’t revolve around a man and relationships,” she says. “Obviously that subsequently happens in her life, but she’s there to work. She’s driven and she’s focused. I like seeing that on my screen.”

The series is compelling not only because of its central female character, but because it was also made primarily by women.

“What's unusual about this is that the books are written by a woman, the showrunner is a woman, it is produced by two women,” Curtis says. “It stars women. It focuses on a family of women, including a queer child. And many of the crew were women. Many of the post-production people were women. In that sense, I think we're making advances.”

Prime Video initially greenlit “Scarpetta” with a two-season order and Season 2 will pair 1993’s “Cruel and Unusual” with 1994’s “The Body Farm.”

“Going into Season 1 was so daunting,” Sarnoff says. “You don’t know how anyone’s going to be or what’s going to happen or what the performances are going to be like. Now we have so much more knowledge. Everybody is excited to do it again.”

[Review, from E1] 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.

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 closeup, 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.

---