Nicole Kidman, brilliant forensic scientist in the most awaited crime series of the year

Nicole Kidman has long been a regular face on TV series, although her luck has been mixed when it comes to the success of her projects. She triumphed with Big Little Lies, but other productions like The Perfect Couple or Nine Perfect Strangers have not been well received by critics. Despite these small failures, the Australian is not faltering in her conquest of television and kicks off 2026 as the protagonist of the adaptation of a famous black novel saga written by Patricia Cornwell. In Scarpetta Kidman plays a brilliant forensic doctor, Kay Scarpetta, who investigates several deaths that seem to be related to a case she worked on 28 years ago and which launched her career. The series premieres this Wednesday on Prime Video and, while waiting to see if it will be the success Kidman desires, it has already received the green light for a second season, currently in production. Kidman is not the only well-known face in the cast of Scarpetta. The other heavy hitter in the production is Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays the protagonist's older sister, Dorothy, a somewhat histrionic woman who has had an intense love life. Currently, she is married to Pete Marino, a detective who was Kay's work colleague and who is played in the series by Bobby Cannavale (the young version of the character is played by the actor's son, Jake Cannavale). The protagonist's family nucleus is completed by her husband, an FBI agent played by Simon Baker (The Mentalist), and her niece, Lucy, played by Ariana DeBose, winner of the Oscar for best supporting actress for West Side Story. Despite being a crime series, Kay's family plays a fundamental role: Patricia Cornwell, author of the novels on which the series is based, has defined her stories as a forensic drama with "a touch of soap opera". Complicated relationships

The soap opera flavor comes from the relationship between all the family members and the way in which, especially the women of the clan, they confront death. When they were children, Kay and her sister Dorothy witnessed the death of their father, an Italian shopkeeper settled in Miami. "The way they react to the murder of their father, which they saw and which took place when they were little, has had enormous ramifications for each of them. It united them, but it also put them in conflict," Kidman explains to The Hollywood Reporter. One of the points of conflict between the two sisters is Lucy: although she is Dorothy's daughter, she was basically raised by Kay. Currently, the girl, a brilliant computer scientist who worked for the FBI, is going through a bad time because her wife has died. Instead of confronting her grief, she remains tied to her memory through an avatar she has created with artificial intelligence. The use of artificial intelligence as a tool to manage death was an element of the plot that particularly interested the showrunner of the series, Liz Sarnoff. "The series is about death and loss, and this is a really different way of dealing with loss. I felt it was important to say: 'This is what's coming. How does it make us feel? And how do we think it affects the person who is saddest?' And it's a focus of discussion among the characters: is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it holding her back? Is it healing her?", Sarnoff reflected during the series premiere.