Scarpetta looks good on paper, but doesn’t work as well as I hoped it would in practice. It mixes together the plots of some of the novels by Patricia Cornwell about Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Scarpetta begins in the present as Kay Scarpetta returns to her job as chief medical examiner after being away. The timeline quickly includes her first case in that job from 28 years ago. The present case and the past case may be related. The case from the past involved a serial killer and established the young and striving Kay with a solid reputation and a degree of fame.

A Big Cast

As the timeline leaps from here to there, different actors are used for every age of the characters. Present Kay is played by Nicole Kidman. Past Kay is Rosy McEwen, who is believably similar in looks. There’s also a teen Kay and a child Kay.

Kay’s sister Dorothy is played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the present and Amanda Righetti in the past. These two women look nothing alike. That was one of several mismatched casting irritants in the series.

The two sisters bickered constantly. It was so nasty and overblown in the first episode that I almost quit watching. But it settles down as time goes by. It doesn’t stop, but it gets less obnoxious and childish.

Over the years, Kay worked cases with a cop, Pete Moreno. He was played by Bobby Cannavale in the present and Bobby’s real life son Jake Cannavale in the past.

Kay also worked with an FBI agent who was now her husband, Benton. (Simon Baker in the present and Hunter Parrish in the past.) Who was Pete Moreno married to? Kay’s sister Dorothy! They all lived together in a big house. Dorothy’s daughter Lucy (Ariana DeBose in the present and Savannah Lumar in the past) lived there, too. One big squabbling family.

Lucy used to be FBI, too, but she quit working when her wife Janet (Janet Montgomery) died. Now she spends all her time talking to an AI version of Janet alone in her cottage behind the big house. Lucy is a computer genius.

I should mention a pesky reporter named Abby (Sosie Bacon) and a cop named Blaise Fruge (Tiya Sircar) who finally lured Lucy out of her cottage and away from her AI woman.

The Mystery

The crimes and cases that make up the mystery part of this series were complex and convoluted. They served to show that our main cast of characters were all far from perfect and not as heroic as you might expect. There was a serial killer in the past and spies and 3D printed human organs in the present. There were plenty of worries over whodunnit and hidden secrets. The ending and the big reveal of the serial killer came as a surprise and a letdown. It felt poorly setup by the plot. Then it turned sickly violent and threw everything into question. (A second season has already been confirmed.)

There were several naked bodies on slabs with horrible injuries for Kay to examine, but the science part of this series was not emphasized. Instead we got relationship drama. Lots of it.

I do love mystery stories with women as the protagonists. I’ll read every single one in a series. I’ve read all the Sue Graftons, all the Dana Stabenows, all the Sara Paretskys, all the Alexander McCall Smiths, and all the Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs. But I quit reading Patricia Cornwell novels after a few. Kay Scarpetta just didn’t speak to me in the same way in the novels as those other women. The TV series didn’t improve my attitude toward Kay Scarpetta. If you love the flawed protagonist, she fits.

Scarpetta was developed and written for television by Liz Sarnoff. Women directors who worked on the series were Charlotte Brändström and Ellen Kuras. You can see all of season 1 now on Prime Video.

If you watch it all the way through, as I did, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the series as a whole. The comments are open.