'Scarpetta' Season 1, Episode 1 Review: Bridge of Time, Part 1

 

Nicole Kidman as Dr. Kay Scarpetta in Amazon Prime's Scarpetta

Bones was fundamentally a TV show about young professionals figuring out how to be the adults in the (big, scary, murdery) room and how to form lasting relationships in spite of their jobs. So it was fine that forensics took a back seat to the lives of Brennan, Booth, and the gang -- most of whom were never featured in the Kathy Reichs book series -- and that made it fun to watch and to review. 

That's not the vibe of Scarpetta, Amazon Prime's new take on the series of forensic thrillers by Patricia Cornwell. It's decidedly darker and harder; a more formidable version of Bones's bumbling optimism. While Bones balanced science and relationships with winking aplomb, Scarpetta feels no obligation to tip the scales away from the grim tasks of the job or to humanize its churlish characters. But the problem here isn't the source material; I've read all of the books, and the series is true them. The problem is that an unflinching Scarpetta makes for uninviting television.

The first episode opens with a dual-timeline reenactment of the first book, Postmortem (1990), and the 25th book, Autopsy (2021), as forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta and her friends and family try to solve a series of murders that are very similar but more than two decades apart.

In the present day, Scarpetta (played by Aussie Nicole Kidman doing a not-great American accent) is called to the scene of a Jane Doe, who was murdered and dumped near railroad tracks. A flashback to 1998 reveals that Scarpetta (played by Brit Rosy McEwen doing a good American accent) had a similar case. Both killings (of tied-up, big-busted, white women) are shown in classical-music-scored flashback snippets that veer into murder porn as Scarpetta intones "manner of death: homicide, mechanism is exsanguination, cause-of-death is sharp force injury to the neck." 

But most of this episode revolves around setting up the one-note characters who will recur throughout the series: Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, Kay's (much) older and eccentric sister; Bobby Cannavale as Pete Marino, Kay's right-hand-man and Dorothy's husband; Ariana DeBose as Lucy Farinelli, Kay's niece and Dorothy's daughter, who just lost her wife; and Aussie Simon Baker as an inconsistently southern-accented Benton Wesley, Kay's husband and an FBI profiler. Scenes include: Kay-and-Dorothy resentment dialed up to 11, Benton being oddly meek, Marino being strangely normal, and Lucy bragging about how rich she is. There are a lot of swear words and very low-lit scenes so that Amazon Prime can prove that it can do drama. And there are hints of the misogyny rampant throughout Cornwell's book series as new secretary Maggie (played by Stephanie Faracy) lingers too long as Scarpetta showers and says it's "marvelous how you've kept your figure all these years."

Unlike Bones, this series is not a case-of-the-week procedural. So we don't get a resolution to the past-and-present murder cases just yet. I suppose I'll have to watch the rest of the series to see how the showrunners deal with the split timeline and the currently one-dimensional characters. Patricia Cornwell is probably thrilled that her books finally made it to the small screen. But I doubt that Scarpetta will have the 12-season staying power of Bones. 

Extraneous Thoughts

• I adore Bobby Cannavale, but he is absolutely not Pete Marino, the bald, overweight, chain-smoking Jersey detective. It is cute, though, that they cast Cannavale's real-life son for the flashbacks.
• I also really enjoyed Simon Baker in The Mentalist, and his American accent is spot-on, so it's tragic that they're making him do a weird southern-ish accent for the character of Benton Wesley, who is from a moneyed New England family. (As I am from Virginia, I can say with certainty that no one is doing any sort of Virginia accent.)
• Fun fact: David Hornsby (who played a cop in this episode but is better known as Rickety Cricket in It's Always Sunny) is married to Bones star Emily Deschanel (Temperance Brennan herself). 
• And of course, Patricia Cornwell made a cameo in the episode, as the Virginia judge who swore in Dr. Scarpetta as the medical examiner in the present day.