Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta has been featured in a very successful series of thriller novels by Patricia Cornwell since 1990.
Now, finally, she's coming to television.
A new prime video series stars Nicole Kidman as the tough, smart Scarpetta whose latest murder case is entangled with a much earlier one.
It was the one that made her reputation, and now she's not sure she got it right.
The show's got a big cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, and Ariana DeBose.
I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about Scarpetta on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
Joining me today is the host of the podcast, happy to be here, Greta Johnson.
Hello, Greta.
Hello, Linda.
Also with us is Christina Tucker.
She's the co-host of the podcast, Wait, Is This a Date?
Hello, Christina.
Yodel slay hee-hoo.
And rounding out the panel is culture writer, Margaret H. Willis.
And hello, Margaret.
Hello.
Hello, Linda.
So happy to be here to unpack this all with you guys.
What an incredibly lively panel.
I'm so delighted to have all of you here.
So Patricia Cornwell has written close to 30 novels about Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner whose work in forensics has made her a legend.
Nicole Kidman plays Kay, adding another TV series to what's become a pretty busy schedule.
Her flaky sister.
Dorothy, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is married to Pete, a former cop who is Kay's longtime bestie and who helps her out on the side.
He's played by Bobby Cannavale.
Kay has been taking care of Dorothy's daughter Lucy, played by Ariana DeBose, since she was a child.
And the tech-savvy Lucy is now dealing with the death of her wife.
Kay's husband, Benton, played by Simon Baker, works for the FBI.
Kay's latest case involves a murdered woman, who immediately reminds Kay of a case she handled many years earlier.
That's right, people.
It's a dual timeline.
We watch the much younger Kay, played by Rosie McEwen, work that case with the much younger Pete in his cop days.
He's played by Bobby Cannavale's son, Jake.
There is a tremendous amount going on in these eight episodes.
We are going to try to make our way through it.
The series is streaming now on Prime Video and we should mention Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content.
I hardly know where to begin, but it is always good to begin with Christina.
So I'm going to begin with Christina.
Talk to me about Scarpetta.
I wish I could coherently, because the show did not present itself in a way that allows me to discuss it coherently, for the show is rather incoherent.
I love a procedural.
I love a cranky lady in her 50s in charge.
I love to see Nicole Kidman on a screen.
I was ready to be pretty easily satisfied by the show.
I was like, OK, this won't be bad. groundbreaking, but it's going to be watchable.
Is it?
I don't know.
I think it's again trying to do so much, but I don't know that it knows what it wants to do, so it's just trying some of everything and it's not working for me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Greta, how about you?
What'd you think?
Yeah, I mean, Christina really nailed it.
I feel like we should also bring up Nicole Kidman smoking cigarettes and how deeply satisfying that is.
But
That might be the biggest upside for me from the show.
She doesn't even have a crazy wig.
No.
No.
In the first couple of minutes, I was sort of like, oh, are they trying to do Mare of Easttown?
Is that kind of what's happening here?
And they did not.
They did not do Mare of Easttown.
I feel like I had to work really hard to come up with redeeming things about this show.
And the one I came up with, which I feel like is still a bit of a stretch, is that we did get queer representation in AI so important.
Yeah, i mean, i think it's really beautiful that every queer character simply must be a hacker and they have to be doing ai.
I think it's a beautiful space for us to be hey.
Hey, they could just be an overachieving police detective that's also true with no special tech savvy.
True, love it.
I love it.
Margaret, how did we get here?
What happened with scarpetta i?
I was really struggling with this show, specifically as like a panelist, because I was like how do I even?
What opinion do I have about this?
It's too strangely shaped for me to have any kind of potent take.
And then sometime around, I think it's episode five, which is like hello from space, my dear.
That is when I realized I was like, oh, I do have a take.
My take is this show demonstrates the challenge of long running detective.
Yeah, I've read the Scarpetta books.
Right.
But I have read many a long running detective series.
And the fundamental issue is you start in book one and it's like grounded.
It's like, yeah, I am a medical examiner in a small town and I have a serial killer.
I've got a catch and maybe they're going to start targeting me, and I've got cops and it's all very normal.
And then you're you become Batman solving the mystery of dead astronauts.
And off the top of my head.
I know how blood spewed into the atmosphere by a bullet in low gravity would perform and also interact with a spaceship's like engineering.
Like, I just walk into the post-mortem space and I just know that.
And that is just, like, I've seen so many small-time detectives become Batman.
Yeah.
And...
Basically, it left me feeling like if the show had been smart enough to just adapt the first book in the series instead of Pairing it with this much, much later book that has all these kind of wackadoo plot points, I think it would have been a much more successful show.
I would have loved to have somebody on the panel who is a Scarpetta completist, who has read all the books.
We did not find such a person who wanted to do this, but I did buy the first one.
And I did sort of read through it to get a sense of how they work.
And, much to my non-surprise, it is a and I say this respectfully, I say this as praise it is a sturdy, traditionally written crime book.
As you said, Margaret, there is a, you know, I am a medical examiner.
This is my job.
There's a lot of the actual forensics.
And all of this interpersonal drama is around the edges.
And that is how books like this typically work.
Right.
For some reason, in making this show, they did not trust that people really wanted a story about the forensics and that people did not want a procedural.
Trying to incorporate close to 30 books worth of backstory.
I mean not all of which they're trying to incorporate, but the basic shape of which they're kind of trying to incorporate.
Yeah, they're touching a lot of rails.
In eight episodes, you basically have the current crime, the past crime.
You have Kay's current marital difficulties, which have some really weird stuff thrown in.
You have her meeting of her husband back in the day and how they got together.
You have her current dynamic with Pete.
You have her past dynamic with Pete.
You have her current dynamic with her niece who lives with her.
You have her past dynamic with her niece, her current dynamic with her sister, her sister's current dynamic with Pete.
And on top of all of this, somebody said what if Lucy the niece not that I expect you to remember all these names what if Lucy the niece was dealing with her grief over her deceased wife by having built an AI version of her wife that she's keeping alive on a bank of computers?
Yep.
Why?
Who is going to do all of the emotional heavy lifting for basically every character.
Every character.
And also some sort of plot moving forward by dropping information.
Yeah.
She's just there to do like literally AI exposition.
Yeah.
They didn't trust what this property is.
And that's what I think is really a shame.
The property is a procedural.
I don't know how you guys feel, but there's not much detectiving or medical examiner-ing in this series.
It's mostly all the other stuff.
I think that's why I liked the flashbacks more so than whatever was going on in the current timeline, because I was like this feels I understand what we're doing here.
We're getting clues.
We're solving a mystery.
I'm understanding how relationships are unfolding.
And then we would zoom back to the present time.
And then Jamie Lee Curtis would just kind of breasting boobily everywhere, which like God love her.
I don't.
Like, I don't really want it to stop.
I want this acting to not be the thing that she's doing anymore.
I want to just take that down a scooch, a scooch, Jamie.
Yeah, unfortunately, this is really her, her role in the bear.
Yeah, she's just in her like big scene chewing era.
It did feel a lot like that.
And you know one of the things that's interesting, we were talking about why they decided to do it this way.
Apparently, the sort of the kind of mover on getting all of this done and made was Jamie Lee Curtis.
You know, was the one who sort of, you know, developed and worked on this project.
So you're naturally going to get...
The part of it with Jamie Lee Curtis and Nicole Kidman and you know, maybe they didn't feel that they had an actor to play the young Scarpetta, who was the same kind of draw that Nicole Kidman would be.
With the problem being I don't know that Nicole Kidman is that much of a draw anymore because of how much like okay television she has made in the last few years, few years.
Yeah, I'm just kind of like, oh, another one.
Really just determined to water down her brand.
Christina, it's so interesting that and it sounds like Margaret too you both preferred the flashbacks.
Oh, vastly.
Yeah.
That's so interesting to me because I thought that was really what weighed down the story.
I think especially, like you know, speaking of Jamie Lee Curtis, Nicole Kidman, Bobby Cannavale and Simon Baker like this is a cast.
Yes.
But then to go through the burden of recasting all of these people and In their younger versions, and try to make emotional sense between what's going on there and what's going on in the present day.
Like, I don't know.
There obviously are a myriad reasons why this show didn't quite work.
But to me, a lot of it was just those flashbacks were so weighed down, I thought.
There was stuff in the past that felt like a narrative.
And then, every time we flashback to whatever this future is, I was like well, I don't know how we got here.
Why are there biosynthetic organs in space?
I will say it took me a shockingly long time maybe to like episode five or six, where I was like this young Bobby Cannavale is really giving young Bobby Cannavale.
And then I said, well, yes, his son would.
His child.
And I will say, I do think that Rosie McKeown gives a lot of young Nicole Kidman.
I think that's pretty persuasive.
One of the things I think is interesting about this conversation, and interesting about kind of the scope of where television is right now, is that there are so many novels that I look at and I think yes, you know, the current streaming model is.
Where you have you know 10-ish.
This is eight, but you have maybe somewhere between eight and 12 episodes of a drama.
They drop either once a week or they drop all at once.
You know, you get that done and that's the novel.
If you think about something like Lessons in Chemistry right, which Brie Larson was in, that's pretty well suited to that kind of format.
Right.
But not everything is made to be that way.
And I think there are books and book series that trying to force them into a prestige drama mode is not going to serve the book that well, because it doesn't allow all of the mechanics of the original writing and the book series yes, to operate the way that they should.
And i think the success of the pit, which is it's obviously kind of a hybrid between a traditional doctor show and a current prestige drama, for a bunch of format related reasons, but it has more episodes right, that's 15 episodes, right.
I think there's a place for them to say you know, let's do Something closer to old-style television where you have this great medical examiner and that's been done right.
That's what Quincy was.
You're all way too young for Quincy, but that's what Quincy was.
There have been other shows starring a medical examiner, a coroner.
I loved Bones.
Right.
Bones, exactly.
Like you know, and some of those shows probably owe some of their success to people operating off of the Kay Scarpetta model.
Yeah.
And it's a shame to see that this to me has kind of sacrificed those shows the best thing that this could have been.
To me, it's not.
I like the current and I don't like the flashbacks.
And it's not.
I like the flashbacks and I don't like the current.
It's either would have been better without this.
I do think both is hugely the problem.
When you get into like the third episode and you realize that you've seen like 10 minutes of eight different stories.
It's too much.
I didn't feel like I had time to get invested in anything.
Yeah.
There's also, by the way, no structural real divide between the flashbacks and the current.
They just cut scene to scene.
I was constantly like relocating myself like, oh, okay.
Who is that again?
It's not like one's in black and white and one's in color.
It's like you're just in your head going back and forth.
The costumes on this show in all eras are different. so misguided because like in the past you would hope that they could use the costumes to effectively signal the time period right instead I've just got to be anchored by like she listens to an Alanis Morissette song in one episode and they go to see the X-Files movie but also she's like addicted to a three-piece suit couldn't get the girl out of a three-piece suit but it doesn't have like a shoulder pad like there's nothing about that suit that she couldn't get at a store today it's like old-timey uh-huh uh-huh And then in the meantime, we have like Ariana DeBose visiting her dead wife's grave in ripped up denim culottes, suit vest, and a tie, like a necktie, but no colored shirt under the suit vest, just bare chest under the suit vest.
And Linda, she's gay.
Look, she is gay, but like as much as I understand the gay aesthetic in fashion-
And like, I would not be surprised to see that at a Muna show.
Sure.
Like, I would be surprised to see that at a Graveside.
And as a way of anchoring me in the character.
It's giving me too much and not enough at the same time.
Ditto Jamie Lee Curtis's costumes.
Oh, yeah.
Giving me a lot of two things.
I truly never had an opportunity to contemplate that woman's breasts the way this show invited me to.
I mean, thank God for that, right?
I had to contemplate something.
I mean, it's one of those things where like I try not to comment on like people's bodies in shows.
But this show is basically making that a big part of sort of who she is and how her character presents.
She's an hypersexual children's book author, of course.
A classic type.
That is right.
That is right.
Can I also just shout out the worst use of box cello suites?
Okay, every single time I was like, why are we doing this?
To choose that iconic, especially soundtrack song for two people having sex in a bathroom is such a wild choice.
I also have to say, as we've talked about, sort of what's in the foreground, which is the personal stuff, versus kind of what's in the background, which is the medical examiner stuff.
If you're not going to put the medical examiner stuff in the foreground, it begins to look pretty bad.
How often you're looking at nude bodies of dead women that have had parts of them chopped off and things like that.
If you're not going to really do the forensics, if you're not going to focus on what this all –
Like how her process of making sense of all of this, right?
Her process of taking this horrible scene and making sense of it.
There's a lot of nude dead bodies here that are pretty attentively shot.
And some of them have been badly mutilated.
All of beautiful young women.
And you get to the point where it's like okay, I get that this is part of it, but those visuals to me have to be approached with a little bit of care in terms of how you're deploying them.
Otherwise, like Jamie Lee Curtis's boobs, it comes off a little bit like it's to be seen right, exactly.
I don't know, I think that's odd.
Yeah, that was kind of in my craw as well and I think, especially in the first episode, I was kind of like okay, I see what we're doing here right, we have this case that reminds her of an old case.
So we're like really digging into this, like and shoot, this is her job.
We're really digging into like, what it means to be a metal examiner, and it does in fact mean cracking open a chest Right.
Yeah, I love that classic.
And then they just start to forget about that but seem to the need to remind us that what we are dealing with is in fact murder.
And they're like shortcut, for that is just like well, here's another dead body that we're going to slowly pan over.
I mean, it makes sense.
That in her line of work, she's going to be looking at dead bodies.
It's not that I don't understand that.
It's that there are ways to do that that are more and less kind of lurid.
I think the more that you focus on the fact that she is unfortunately being confronted with these things because of what she does, then the more it seems like it's organic to the story and the show and her character right, whether that's her character is very upset by seeing things like this or that.
She isn't, and both of those things can be valid right, especially by the time she's in her 50s or whatever she is, maybe it doesn't upset her that much.
Well, Linda, she met death when she was 11.
That was her formative moment.
Yeah.
It's defined her whole life.
I even noticed that in all of the previously on Scarpetta they seem to always really go back to some of these shots of the bodies.
And I always think, is there not another way you could have done that?
Just don't use the dead bodies as this is our key beauty shot. something like that.
Yeah.
I was really hoping for more of like the kind of getting into the gritty part of like yes, this is what it means to be a medical examiner.
And I think the books have that.
And then I kind of felt like the rug was pulled out of under me a little bit.
Like they were like yeah, you get a little bit of this, but actually no, we're just going to give you kind of these kind of grotesque shots and you're going to deal.
When the most emotionally relatable character in your present timeline is is the AI life.
That's both a dramatic misrepresentation of what AI is capable of at this point in time and a real writing problem.
Speaking of Scarpetta's character, the other thing I found kind of troubling was that, When it came to the fact that they may have gotten this case wrong, there didn't seem to be as much concern for like justice as there was for her reputation.
Which also you know.
It's like if you got the wrong guy, that's a huge problem for the other people who this guy is going to try and murder.
Arguably more so than whether or not you're going to have a job.
And whether it invalidates you professionally is something I understand talking about with your husband maybe.
But I don't know that it's the point of the problem.
And I think without spoiling anything, I can say...
It becomes clear, I think, pretty quickly that there's maybe a little bit less to that part of the story than meets the eye anyway.
The idea of the cases are connected, you get this wrong.
It's not that it isn't anything, but it's a little bit less compelling that part of the story anyway.
Absolutely.
This just got badly fumbled.
It makes me sad.
It just feels like it's one of those opportunities where I'm just like I don't understand how like long running series like this are not such an easy thing to just Just just like make it happen.
I just feel like it should not be as challenging as it is.
But it feels like they just really were, like we want to grab a little bit of everything from everywhere and sprinkle it in here.
It does seem like it should just be highly adaptable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just think we should all pour one out for the 2005 procedural Jamie Lee Curtis as Scarpetta.
We should have had that.
That's a good point.
And I am sad that the world fumbled it because I would have watched it in reruns.
And then you could have watched The Mentalist right after.
It would have been great.
It would have been great.
It would have been a much better use of both their talents.
Everybody's talents.
That's absolutely true.
Absolutely true.
I am sort of fascinated by things like this that feel to me like they don't work at all.
Well, then it's like, am I missing something?
Well, we've sort of alluded to this but, like I think particularly Nicole Kidman and Ariana DeBose are both people I feel like I see a lot but I don't necessarily see them doing much the kinds of things that I think are the best use of their talents.
You know, obviously, Ariana DeBose, I do think she could be doing more interesting stuff than this.
And certainly Nicole Kidman, who seems to now show up very regularly in these sort of TV shows.
That are fine.
Maybe this is the way in which there's too much television.
It's just I stopped caring about some of the things that used to make me go.
Because, you know, you remember back in Big Little Lies days, it was like.
Yeah.
Nicole Kidman's in this.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we're all a little bit confused by this one, but I'm curious to hear what other people think.
We want to know what you think about Scarpetta.
Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Greta Johnson, Christina Tucker, Margaret H Willison.
Thank you for being here and helping me make my way through Scarpetta.
Yeah.
Honestly, an honor.
It was a huge honor.
Thank you.
This episode is produced by Hafsah Fathima and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
Hello Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next time.
