Scarpetta

All in all, the Oscar-winner playing a detective of any kind was always going to make for compulsive viewing – which Scarpetta is, if you can get past the tonal whiplash.

A pretty good version of something we've seen before, but still: nothing exactly new.

It all makes for a delightfully deranged series that, in its eight-episode first season, has something for everyone.

It’s a dime-store paperback put through Hollywood’s prestige machine. Each bonkers bit is a nice reminder not to take anything too seriously. Just enjoy the weirdness. Kidman certainly is.

Murder mystery obsessives will want to check out "Scarpetta," but it's a waste of time for the rest of us.

Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis star in a miscast, misshapen, misbegotten crime series that ends as a crime against the great Patricia Cornwall novels that spawned it.

The series is packed tighter with incidents than a Marx Brothers stateroom, including a pseudo-spiritual grief cult, 3D-printed human organs, a fallen space station, intra-office rivalry and crushes and, not to forget, murders. .... Cannavale is the series’ MVP, grounding Kidman in their scenes and Curtis in theirs, and seeming, more than most of these characters, like a person you might meet in this life we call real. As younger Kay, Rosy McEwen carries the past-set scenes, and could support a series of her own.

Though the actors are famous and talented, they can't pull "Scarpetta" up from its ho-hum bootstraps into something bigger and better. What we have here is a very OK murder show with a (likely) very expensive cast.

The show cuts between the two tracks metronomically, giving them roughly equal time, and there is a lot of evidence to keep track of; cellphone checkers may find themselves lost pretty quickly. What you can’t miss, however, is how the contemporary story has been conceived as histrionic soap opera. .... The early timeline, by contrast, is rational and reasonably absorbing, a straightforward (if grisly) procedural mystery that is not insultingly silly by the standards of serial-killer drama.

As much as I was or wasn’t entertained by Scarpetta as a TV show — it’s got some good adaptive ideas and some predictable ghoulish flaws — I’ll be curious to see if its audience is prone to flexibility.

The family psychodrama detracts from the case instead of complementing it. .... There’s something about the repeated use of them [female murder victims] here in this expensively made, awards-baiting series that feels grotesque.

Kidman and Curtis have terrific chemistry, and they clearly have good fun as warring siblings whose childhood animosity has bubbled over into adult hostility. But, really, their scenes could have come from any half-decent drama, and they alone cannot save Scarpetta.

Overstuffed. .... A treat amid all the narrative disarray is watching Mr. Parrish and Amanda Righetti (the younger Dorothy) mirror the mannerisms and vocal tics of their older selves. Unlike so much here, their technique is both subtle and effective.

The ensemble is so jam-packed that the characters overwhelm any semblance of narrative the show is trying to achieve. It’s unfortunate that most of them feel like caricatures rather than fully realized characters, as conversations between them often end in a cacophony of overwhelming yelling backed by crocodile tears. Thankfully, in the ’90s timeline, McEwen breathes some much-needed life into the series.