| March 9, 2026 
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A gruesome thriller starring Nicole Kidman | | Nicole Kidman plays a Virginia medical examiner in “Scarpetta,” based on the character created by Patricia Cornwell. Connie Chornuk/Prime |
Dear Watchers,Kay Scarpetta, the author Patricia Cornwell’s formidable, no-nonsense forensic pathologist, would seem tailor-made for TV. Yet it took 36 years and 29 novels for Kay to get her first onscreen appearance, in the new Amazon series “Scarpetta” — premiering Wednesday on Prime Video. Played by Nicole Kidman — no stranger to portraying intelligent, sometimes chilly heroines — Kay is above all a scientist, tasked with solving grisly crimes. Kay is just one month into her job as Virginia’s chief medical examiner when we meet her. But the role represents a homecoming of sorts: 28 years earlier, she held the same position. As the series begins, Kay is roused from bed by a call about the gruesome discovery of a murdered young woman. Disturbing parallels soon emerge between this new investigation and another that plagued her 28 years before. The rest of the series hops back and forth between that earlier timeline and the present day. The same people keep popping up. Detective Peter Marino works the case with Kay in 1998, then re-teams with her in 2026, after he has retired from the force. (Bobby Cannavale plays the older version; his son Jake plays the younger.) A colleague and potential love interest in the earlier timeline (Hunter Parrish) has since become Kay’s husband (Simon Baker). In both eras, Kay butts heads with her free-spirited sister, Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis, having fun with cleavage and leopard prints), and looks after her niece as both a child (Savannah Lumar) and an adult (Ariana DeBose). Oh, and Peter is now married to Dorothy. (The relationships have gotten fairly messy across dozens of books and several decades.) Dorothy may describe her sister as “joyless, coldhearted and scientific,” but Kay’s sober exterior masks a fierce dedication to justice and the dead. As a child, she witnessed the murder of her father; “Death,” she says, “is all I’ve thought about since I was 11.” The job demands emotional distance, but Kay doesn’t lose sight of the human costs behind the bodies that wind up on her table. “I’ll take good care of her,” she tells one victim’s grieving sister. The dual-track storytelling mostly works, even as the connection between cases can feel a bit forced: The rapport among characters (or lack thereof) in the current timeline feels informed by what we see in the past, and Rosy McEwen is convincing as the younger, brasher, less wearied version of Kidman’s character. The cast is terrific, the performances strong. Perhaps the biggest mystery is why it took so long to bring Kay Scarpetta to the screen. Also this week | | Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden in a scene from the new comedy “Sunny Nights.” Hulu |
- “Sunny Nights,” a crime dramedy starring Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden, about spray tan entrepreneurs who get drawn into Sydney’s criminal underworld, premieres Wednesday, on Hulu.
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- “That Night,” a Spanish language thriller about a hit-and-run accident and the lies that follow, arrives Friday, on Netflix.
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- The first three episodes of the latest Taylor Sheridan series, “The Madison,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, debut Saturday, on Paramount+.
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- Based on the Japanese manga about a heroic rooster that defends humanity from monsters, “Rooster Fighter” premieres on Saturday at midnight, on Adult Swim.
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