Scarpetta

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“Medical exam in our K-Scarpada 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 Scarpada 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 Conavali, and Ariana Devos. I'm Linda Holmes and today we're talking about Scarpada on pop culture happy hour from NPR. Hey, it's Latte from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think

how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcast. Joining me today is the host of the podcast happy to be here Greta Johnson. Hello Greta. Hello Linda. Also with us is Kristina Tucker. She's the co-host of the podcast. Wait, is this a date? Hello Kristina. Y'all will say hi. And rounding out the panel is culture writer Margaret H. Wilson. 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. Patricia Cornwell has written close to 30 novels about K-Scarpada, a medical examiner who is work in Forensics has made her a legend. Nicole Kidman plays K adding another TV series to what's become a pretty busy schedule. Her flakey sister Dorothy played by Jamie Lee Curtis is married to Pete, a former cop who's K's longtime bestie and who helps her out on the side.

He's played by Bobby Conavali. K has been taking care of Dorothy's daughter Lucy played by Ariana DeBos since she was child. And a tech savvy Lucy is now dealing with the depth of her wife. K's husband Benton played by Simon Baker works for the FBI. K's latest case involves a murdered woman who immediately reminds K of a case she handled many years earlier. That's right, people. It's a dual timeline. We watch the much younger K played by Rosie McQ and work that case with

the much younger Pete in his cop days. He's played by Bobby Conavali'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 Kristina. So I'm going to begin with Kristina. Talk to me about Scarpetta. I wish I could cope here in Lee because the show did not present itself in a way that allows me to discuss it coherently for the show is rather in coherein. I love a procedural. I love a cranky lady and her fifties and charge. I love to see Nicole Kidman on the screen. I was ready to be pretty easily satisfied by the show. I was like, okay, this won't be 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, Greta how about you, would you think? Yeah, I mean Kristina 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. Like she doesn't even have a crazy wit. No. No.

In the first couple of minutes, I was sort of like, oh, are they trying to do Mary of East Town?

Like is that kind of what's happening here? Yeah, and they did not. They did not do Mary of East Town. I feel like I had to work really hard to come up with like 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. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really beautiful that every queer”

character simply must be a hacker and they do be doing AI. I think it's a beautiful space for us to be. Hey, hey, they could just be an over-achieving police detective. That's also true. With no special text, I love it. I love it. Margaret, how did we get here? What happened with Scarpa? I was really struggling with this show, specifically as like a panelist because I was like, how do I

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 series. Yeah, I've read the Scarpa de Books right, but I have read many a long-running detective series. And the fundamental issue is you started 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've you become Batman.

So many of 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 space ships 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 whack-a-do 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 Scarpa de 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 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 back story. Yeah. 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, touch it a lot of rails in eight episodes. You basically

have the current crime, the past crime. You have K's current marital difficulties, which have some really weird stuff. And 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 a live on a bank of computers? Yeah. Why? Who is going to do

all of the emotional heavy lifting for basically 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 detective or medical examinering 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 relations are unfolding. And then we would zoom back to the present time

and then Jamie Lee Curtis would just kind of breast and blubbly everywhere which like bought her. I 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 it. 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

didn't feel that they had an actor to play the young Scarpeda 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 drawing anymore because of how much like okay television she has made in the last few years. Yeah, I'm just kind of like, oh, another one. Really just determined to water down her brand. Yeah. Christina, it's so interesting that, and it sounds like Margaret too. You both preferred the flashbacks. Oh, that's like, 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 kind of all day. And Simon Baker, like, this is a cast. Yes. But then to go through

the burden of recasting all of these people 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'm, I don't know, there obviously are a myriad reasons why this showed in 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 their biosynthetic organs in space? I will say it took me a shockingly long,

maybe to like episode five or six, where I was like, this young Bobby kind of all day is really giving young Bobby kind of all day. And then I said, well, yes, new sun, whoa, it's child.

“And I do think that Rosie McEwen gives a lot of young Nicole Kidman. I think that's pretty”

persuasive. No. 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 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 Bree Larson was in, that's pretty well suited to that kind of format. But not everything is made to be that way. And I think there are books and books 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 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 an 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 or you have this great medical examiner and that's been done, right? That's what Quincy”

was. You're all way to young for Quincy, but that's what Quincy was. There have been other shows starring a medical examiner, a coroner. I loved bone. Right. Bones exactly. Like, you know, in some of those shows probably, oh, some of their success to people operating off of the case Garpeda model. 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. Right. 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 both. 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

too much. I didn't feel like I'd 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? It's not like one's in black and white and ones in color. It's like you're just in your head going back and forth. The costumes on this show in all Ures are 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 illness more a set song in one episode and they go to see the ex files movie. But also she's like addicted to a three piece suit. I didn'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 it a store today. It's like old time me. Uh-huh. And then in the meantime,

we have like Ariana Dibos visiting her dead wife's grave in rips up denim clots suit vest and uh

And when she's gay. 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 Adamuna show. Sure. Like I would be surprised to see that”

at a great side. And as a way of anchoring me and the character, it's giving me too much and not enough at the same time. Dido Jamie McCritus's costume. Oh yeah, giving me a lot of two things. Yeah.

Julie never had an opportunity to contemplate that woman's breasts the way the show invited me to.

Yeah. 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 the people's bodies and shows. But this show is basically making that a big part of sort of who she is and what her character presents. She's an extra hyper-sexual children's book author. Of course. A classic tight. That is right. That is. Can I also just shout out the worst use of box cellos sweets? Okay. Every single time I was like

why are we doing that? Just choose that iconic, especially soundtrack song. For two people having sex in a bathroom is such a wild choice. I also have to say like as we've talked about sort of the 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

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 and 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”

draw 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 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 lured. 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. Yes, it's to find her whole life. I even noticed that like in all of the like previously on

Scarpeda, they seem to always really go back to some of these shots of the bodies, and I always

think there's not another way you could have done that. They're like just don't use the dead bodies as like this is our key beauty shot or 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 find I 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 know we're just going to give you kind of these kind of grotesque shots and you're going to deal. Well, the most emotionally relatable character in your present timeline is I, I like that's both a dramatic misrepresentation of what AI is capable of at this point in time and a real writing problem. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Scarpeda'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've got the wrong guy, that's a huge problem for the other people who this guy is going to try and murder. Right. Our arguably more so than whether or not you're going to have a job.

about like 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”

like maybe a little bit less to that part of the story that meets the eye anyway, the idea of, you know, 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. It's just got badly fumble. 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 like make it happen. I'm 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. Well, I just think we should all

pour one out for the 2005 procedural Jamie Lee Curtis as Scarpeda. 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 reverence on TNT until the day I didn't watch the mentalist right after. What have been great? It would have been great. It would have been a much better use of both their talents. Everybody still has 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? Like, well, we've sort of

“alluded to this, but like I think particularly Nicole Kidman and Ariana Dibos are both people.”

I feel like I see a lot, but I don't necessarily see them doing the kinds of things that I think are the best use of their talents. You know, obviously Ariana Dibos. 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 Kelvin. It's just I stop caring about some of the things that used to make me go. Because

you know, you remember back in big little lot of his days. It was like, yeah, Nicole Kidman's in this.

“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 Scarpeda. Find us at Facebook.com/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 Scarpeda. Yeah, it was a huge honor. Thank you. This episode is produced by Hafsifatima and my catsuffin edited by our showrunner Jessica Readie. 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. Hey, it's Latte from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen, wherever you get podcasts.