Nicole Kidman’s Amazon Prime thriller Scarpetta is too absurd to work

Warning: spoilers ahead for the first season of Scarpetta.

I’ll give it to you straight – Scarpetta is my most disappointing TV watch of the year so far.

I’m writing this review hours after finishing the last of the eight episodes. I hoped that the finale would deliver a payoff to make up for the discombobulation leading up to it.

Sadly, I was left feeling even more dissatisfied.

Scarpetta isn’t without its merits, so much so that I considered giving it a three-star rating, instead of two. The serial killer thriller – which is based on the book series by Patricia Cornwell – stars the formidable Nicole Kidman as Dr Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist.

In the present day, Kay comes out of retirement to resume her post as chief medical examiner in Virginia to investigate a gruesome murder. The show then flits back to the past, when a younger version of Kay – played by British actress Rosy McEwen – is trying to track down a serial killer who’s killed several women in the most disturbing ways.

On paper, you would think that this would be enough for a gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. But there’s so much else going on. Needlessly, I might add.

Kay’s older sister, Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), is an eccentric loose cannon whose sole purpose seems to be to highlight how straight-laced and serious the titular character is. I’ve admired Jamie as an actress my whole life, and Dorothy is clearly meant to provide comic relief in an otherwise horrifying story, but it just doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, Ariana DeBose plays Lucy, a tech whiz who’s Dorothy’s daughter and Kay’s niece. She recently suffered the death of her wife Janet (Janet Montgomery), and to deal with her grief, she’s created an AI version of her late partner, whom she talks to almost constantly every day.

This storyline in itself is interesting, and reminds me of the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back. As fascinating as this concept is (and pertinent for the times we’re living in), it feels as though it’s been squished into an already packed narrative.

That’s not all. We also have another element of the plot about a lab in space that crashes to Earth, where scientists were creating biosynthetic organs. I promise I’m not making this up.

Then there’s the dysfunctional family drama element of it all. Kay is married to FBI agent Benton Wesley (Simon Baker), whom she first met while investigating a serial killer in her younger years. Dorothy is married to former detective Peter Marino (Bobby Cannavale), who is also a longtime colleague of Kay’s.

Kay and Dorothy are always at each other’s throats. Dorothy, who was largely an absent mother to Lucy when she was growing up, is worried about her daughter’s dependency on an AI version of her late wife. Kay and Benton are keeping various secrets from each other. And their family ties complicate the murder case that they’re all involved in.

It’s all just a bit much.

For me, the saving grace for Scarpetta is the flashback scenes. As much as I love Nicole as a performer, I would have been very happy watching a version of this show set entirely in the past, with Rosy’s version of Kay working with her future husband and future brother-in-law to hunt down the serial killer brutalising and terrifying their neighbourhood.

When deciding how I would rate Scarpetta, I considered if this is a show that I would recommend to my friends. While I was invested to a certain degree, sadly the answer is no.

At times, it feels as though this drama doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. Is it a serial killer thriller? Is it a family drama? Is it a dark dystopian sci-fi? There’s nothing to say that a TV show can’t fall under several different genres, but Scarpetta spreads itself too thin by trying to be too much.

Given that the drama ends on a cliffhanger, it makes sense that season two is already in the works. At this moment, I don’t know whether my curiosity will get the better of me when the second season comes around. Right now, I think I’m going to let the dead rest.

Scarpetta is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

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