TV Reviews: Scarpetta, A Woman Of Substance

Amazon owns the rights to a lot of long-running novel series that make for shows that are often no more than reliably solid, but which Amazon loves because they come with prebuilt fan bases. Think of Bosch, Reacher, and Jack Ryan, for example. Now here’s Scarpetta, another one named for its main character, based on the Patricia Cornwell series that is now 36 years and 28 books long.

Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta

It’s been in the works for years, with people like Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie attached at different points, but it’s finally reached the screens now with Nicole Kidman in the title role. Amazon seem very pleased with this: a high-profile actor who will surely bring some gravitas to the role. General TV viewers might be less excited, since Kidman has long since become a near-expressionless performer appearing only in fairly shallow dramas. And I suspect fans of the books will find her a bit less dark, feisty and Italian than the Scarpetta they’ve known for decades.

In any event, this first series comes with two separate timelines: one in which chief medical officer Kay Scarpetta is returning (after a long, as-yet-unexplained absence) to her old dissecting ground, and one in which she is played (very well) by Rosy McEwen as a skilled young doctor who has not yearned her reputation. In the present day, Scarpetta is called out to a nasty murder which immediately recalls a very similar case from early in her career – so we follow both versions of Scarpetta on her separate-but-linked cases, meeting various colleagues and rivals along the way.

Those scenes work reasonably well. But no more than that: it’s suddenly gory for no obvious reason, then it moves to scenes of corporate chitchat with impossibly well-groomed men that you just know will get in Scarpetta’s righteous way. There’s no tension in them, but the possible link between the cases does keep your curiosity alive.

On the other hand, we spend far too much time with Scarpetta’s domestic life, chiefly watching her bicker with her sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis). It’s not just that there are so many of these scenes that they completely kill the mood, but they are in their own right usually awful. Perhaps in a few episodes, if we can endure that long, we will have some understanding of the characters, but to launch us right into several loud, shrill kitchen squawkfests before we even know who they are, and before we’ve had a chance to even invest in the crime story, is unforgivable.

There is, undoubtedly, a solid long-running series in all those Scarpetta novels. But this, veering all over the place in tone and feeling distinctly MOR, is not it. It also needs a lead who appears to be actually engaged with the role; maybe Kidman is restraining herself for bigger moments later on, but early on at least she just gives off the energy of someone doing a job they regret taking on. Indeed I would say she just seems scundered.  

I have to confess, I’m old enough to remember the original TV adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman Of Substance. At the time it was hard to miss it: there were only three episodes but it must have been constantly repeated because it seemed to be on forever, giving all that big broad, glossy energy of the “mini-series” so popular at the time (fun fact: there’s a young Liam Neeson in it).

Brenda Blethyn in A Woman Of Substance

In fact that kind of soapy thing – if it was a book it’d come with a big silver, slightly relief author’s name on the cover – has thankfully fallen so far out of favour now that even relaunches of Dallas and Dynasty failed to catch on. And when I saw the trailer for Channel 4’s new remake of AWOS, well, it looked so cheesily melodramatic that I thought they were playing it for knowing humour.

Alas, no. In fact there’s almost no intentional humour at all in it.  In this new, eight-part remake, Jessica Reynolds plays the young Emma Harte, a maid to the wealthy Fairley family, who variously betray, belittle, assault and look down on their staff in 1911 Yorkshire. Then again, they do similar things with each other, all presided over by a slightly too-young-looking Emmett Scanlan as Adam Fairley.

But Emma takes her heartbreak and suffering and, putting her mother’s deathbed advice (“get out and get on”…though the less said about her melodramatic death scene on the crags of Yorkshire the better) to good use, and when we meet her again in the 1970s she is the richest woman in the world, played by Brenda Blethyn in a silver wig, and still adamant that “What I’ve dedicated my life to is revenge.”

Despite Blethyn’s mighty squint as she says that, the show is not aiming for the camp tones that such a dated and preposterous story needs these days. And it’s not that it’s technically poor. The houses and landscapes are handsome, and the acting generally quite good: Blethyn is a touch OTT as she often is, and Scanlan a touch blank as he often is, but Reynolds is feisty as Emma and Ewan Horrocks makes Emma’s first love Edwin Fairley more interesting than you’d expect.

But it has neither the wit to really entertain, nor the grit to feel real, and the dated source material has a cheesiness that this couldn’t escape even if it tried: it’s coming through a more modern sieve, but it’s the same old slop.