Scarpetta Review – This Nicole Kidman Show Is a Hot Mess… With an AI Chatbot as the Main Character | television

SThe Carpetta has been a long time in the making. Demi Moore was as attached to the role of forensic pathologist Patricia Cornwell in the 1990s as Angelina Jolie was in the 2000s. In a recent interview, the writer said she connected with Jodie Foster and Helen Mirren along the way. Now it has finally arrived on our screens, thanks in part to Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer and one of its stars, with Nicole Kidman in the lead role, continuing her run as the hardest-working broadcaster in television. What a shame, then, that after such a long wait, it’s so terrible: a stereotypical mess that insists on stripping the original work down to its bits and putting a cynical techno twist on the proceedings to boot.

There are – for no really good reason – two timelines in the series. In the present, Kidman plays Virginia’s chief medical officer, Kay Scarpetta, a slightly icy, professional character who is prone to transgression and haunted by secrets from the past. She was called to the crime scene where the woman’s naked body – sans hands – was tied with rope. Flashback to the 1990s, where young Scarpetta (Rosie McEwen) is tracking down a similar killer, who leaves strange, shiny residue on his victims. At first, at least, it seems as though this might be an interesting proposition, for all the back and forth between past and present, which was not part of Cornwell’s original novel. The idea that Scarpetta and her colleague and brother-in-law Pete Marino (played by Bobby Cannavale) may have landed on the wrong man in the 1990s — when DNA evidence was still in its infancy — could be the basis for a clever crime. Instead, we get sluggish procedurals that barely produce any tension. Moments of blood coming out of left field. The key revelations in the case come to Scarpetta as surprise revelations from the machine; And dead women are just fodder for the plot in a way that seems positive and dirty. The tone is strange – sometimes it’s The Silence of the Lambs, sometimes the diagnosis: murder.

But there is worse to come. Because Scarpetta also insists on updating its source material to include – yes, really – an AI chatbot as one of its main characters. Janet (Janet Montgomery) is the dead wife of Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy (Ariana DeBose). There’s a sort of Black Mirror B subplot about their relationship, which gets repetitive very quickly. But hey, if you want to see Jamie Lee Curtis – who plays Lucy’s mother Dorothy – having a heart-to-heart via a computer screen, Scarpetta is the place for you. See also: A tragic story about a company that 3D-prints body parts, culminating in the death of a group of astronauts. It’s as if no one involved had enough buy-in from the source material, and the sense that Scarpetta is fighting a misogynistic section – as in Cornwell’s novel – can almost be summed up in her demanding that Marino not use words like “bitch” in her presence.

Kidman and Curtis have great chemistry, and are clearly having good fun as warring brothers whose childhood animosity turns into adult animosity. But, in reality, their scenes could have come from any half-decent drama, and they alone cannot save Scarpetta. McEwen also does her best, but it’s hard to get a sense of who our heroine is, beyond the professional and personal traumas that have shaped her (in a slightly inelegant flashback, we learn that her father was murdered in front of her in his grocery store).

Scarpetta is undoubtedly the pinnacle of the Prestige Trash. In the past, a show with this many big names was supposed to be half decent – ​​now it’s just fine to add more and more silliness, expanding what could have been a tight four-parter into an increasingly bizarre eight episodes. Could a clever, slightly modern adaptation have been too harsh for the powers that be? The trend toward rolling back existing intellectual property seems onerous, but Scarpetta highlights the danger of trying too hard.

Scarpetta is on Prime Video now.