Who is the most boring medical examiner on TV? Scarpetta. Hands down — at least in the TV series.
I haven’t read the Patricia Cornwell books this series is based on, and after watching S1E1, “The Bridge of Time, Part One,” I’m not exactly running to the library to put them on hold.
Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist and tell me the books are better. I’m sure they are. That’s usually how these things go. But we’re not reading the books, are we? We’re putting Scarpetta on trial to find out whether it’s enjoyable television.
Season 1 runs only eight episodes and Scarpetta has already been renewed for Season 2. With Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis above the title, I’m not exactly shocked. Meanwhile, plenty of shows people actually enjoy get tossed into the streaming dumpster after one season. Ask Kevin Bacon, whose Prime Video series The Bondsman got the axe after one season and a cliffhanger.
So why did Scarpetta get stuck in the River of Molasses? Let’s investigate.
The Dead vs. the Dead Air
It actually starts well.
A train barrels down the tracks. We zero in on a penny sitting on the rail and then a dead woman lying on the ballast. Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) gets the middle-of-the-night call to come to the scene. It’s familiar crime-show territory, but it works. Who’s the woman? What happened to her? What’s with the penny?
I’m in, but then, barely a minute later, Scarpetta hits the brakes.
We watch her read a note on the pillow next to her. Wash her face. Put on deodorant. Grind coffee beans. Make coffee. Leave the house. Get into the car. Drive across a bridge while smoking a cigarette. Finally, she arrives at the crime scene. The whole thing takes about two minutes.
You can tell me it’s establishing Scarpetta’s meticulous routine, and I’ll even give you that one. Maybe we’re learning something about how she thinks and how regimented her life is.
Except Scarpetta isn’t finished with it.
After she examines the body and gets into an argument with her ex, Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale), we jump back 28 years — and essentially do the same routine again with the younger Scarpetta.
She’s even smoking while driving across a bridge on her way to another crime scene. Okay, I get it. She hasn’t changed. But can we solve a murder now?
There is an actual story developing. The victim from the past appears to have similarities to the woman found on the tracks in the present. But everything moves at the pace of molasses. Scarpetta examines a room and we linger on it. She deals with the media. She gets sassy with her boss. Somewhere in there, I think we meet a younger Pete Marino, but the past and present are already starting to blur together.
By the 12-minute mark, I was so bored I went to check social media to see if anything more interesting was happening.
It was.
Flashback Whiplash
When I returned, Scarpetta hadn’t improved.
The constant jumping between past and present becomes so frequent that I stopped being entirely sure which era I was watching. At one point, the show uses split screens of past and present Scarpetta performing autopsies, which actually helps. For about ten seconds.
Then everything starts melting into one again.
Flashbacks aren’t the problem. Plenty of shows juggle multiple timelines without making me wonder what year I’m currently occupying. Scarpetta just doesn’t give the different periods enough visual or narrative separation to make the transitions effortless.
And the cinematography isn’t helping.
Everything is muted. It’s not so dark that you have to squint to figure out what’s happening, but nothing pops, either. Maybe the contrast is especially noticeable because I’ve been watching so much television from the ’70s, but Scarpetta looks as sleepy as it feels.
Jamie Lee Curtis Plays… Jamie Lee Curtis
Eventually we meet Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy Farinelli (Jamie Lee Curtis), at a cemetery, where the two are engaged in a tense sibling spat.
Curtis is basically playing a sisterly version of Jamie Lee Curtis — almost a caricature of herself. But she’s not nearly as much fun as Curtis can be when she’s allowed to go completely off the rails like in Scream Queens, for example. She’s trying hard, I’ll give her that, but in the end it falls flat. (Did I make that rhyme on purpose? Absolutely.)
Then it’s back aboard the Flashback Express. Past. Present. Past. Present. I think I got whiplash.
Eventually you reach that magical point in a bad show when a 90-second commercial break comes on and you realize the commercials are more interesting than the show you were watching. That’s when you know it’s time to tap out. Didn’t even make it to the end.
🗑️ Our Verdict: TRASH. For some reason Scarpetta reminds me of Bones. I didn’t like that show and didn’t like the actress. The same can be said here. If you want to watch a medical examiner with bite, watch Crossing Jordan.
- ➝ 📺 Watch If You Dare: Want to judge them yourself? We’ve gathered the trailers for Scarpetta and four other shows into our Trial by Stream: Prestige or Trash YouTube Playlist.
- ➝ 📡 Keep Exploring: Had enough of the subscription treadmill? Head into the Free TV Frontier and see what you can find without spending another dime.
- ➝ 📇 The TV Rolodex: Looking for a specific legend or forgotten loser? Search our TV Rolodex: A–Z Archive to see every show we’ve embraced or chased.
