In 1990, Patricia Cornwell published Postmortem, her first crime thriller featuring Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Over the next 28 series installments, Scarpetta moves around quite a bit, investigating gruesome murders in Florida, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and New York, often involving serial killers and sometimes taking strange turns. In Autopsy (2021), for example, Scarpetta returns to her old post in Virginia, where she’s quickly embroiled in an investigation involving a brutally murdered woman—the victim of a killer known as the Railway Slayer—and, believe it or not, multiple dead astronauts.

Postmortem introduced Scarpetta’s difficult sister, Dorothy, and computer-hacker niece, Lucy, as well as police detective Pete Marino and FBI profiler Benton Wesley, who all appear in later books; the first novel’s plot focuses mainly on Scarpetta’s attempts to catch a serial rapist and murderer who always strikes on Friday nights. The first season of a new Prime Video streaming series, Scarpetta, draws from Postmortem and Autopsy, moving between the past and present to tell a complex tale of Scarpetta’s career and family life. The show stars three Oscar winners—Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta, Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, and Ariana DeBose as Lucy—as well as Emmy winner Bobby Cannavale as Marino, The Mentalist’s Simon Baker as Wesley, and Rosy McEwen (The Alienist) as the young Scarpetta. It premieres on March 11.

It may be difficult for many readers to understand how unusual Postmortem was in 1990. At the time, even DNA testing was a nascent science, and forensic detectives were a rarity in crime fiction. Sure, there had been medical-examiner sleuths before—most notably, the titular character on the popular NBC TV series Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman—but Cornwell’s novels often offered more complex clinical mysteries; in Postmortem, the investigation hinges, in part, on the source of a strange smell at a crime scene—one that turns out to be the result of an ultrarare metabolic disorder. Cornwell’s novels were bestsellers off the bat, and it’s hard not to see their influence on such works as the blockbuster CBS TV show CSI, which premiered in 2000 and started its own franchise.

Cornwell’s books aren’t all science, though; they’re just as much about Scarpetta’s prickly relationships with her colleagues—some of whom actively dislike her and do their best to undermine her. Scarpetta also has fraught relationships with her sibling, Dorothy, a flighty, self-involved children’s-book author and graphic novelist; and with Dorothy’s computer-genius daughter, Lucy, who, in Autopsy, has created an AI version of her recently deceased wife, Janet, as part of her grieving process.

The show takes a fascinating approach to the problem of adapting a very long-running series by setting it in two different time periods: The Postmortem plot is set in 1998, and the Autopsy plot in the present day, with different actors cast as the younger and older versions of major characters. As the season goes on, viewers come to understand how the various players’ relationships have evolved and changed. This generally works well, thanks, in part, to some remarkable performances. Kidman plays Scarpetta as an all-business, emotionally closed-off workaholic; her gritty demeanor recalls the actor’s brilliant performance as a burnt-out cop in the underseen 2018 crime drama Destroyer. McEwen, as the younger Scarpetta, uncannily conjures Kidman’s mannerisms, while also insightfully portraying the vulnerabilities that the older Scarpetta tries so hard to hide. Curtis depicts the narcissistic Dorothy as an insufferable extrovert who always needs to be the center of attention; it fits the character perfectly, but it can be hard, as a viewer, to take for extended periods—and that, perhaps, is the point. DeBose, Cannavale, and Baker also acquit themselves well, as do the actors playing their characters’ younger versions (including Jake Cannavale, Bobby’s son, who plays the past Marino with flair).

Unfortunately, showrunner/writer Liz Sarnoff (Lost, Alcatraz) and her creative team also strive mightily to weave Postmortem’s and Autopsy’s mystery plots together, with less success. The former novel is a fairly straightforward serial-killer thriller—grim in tone and lacking any flights of fancy. Autopsy, on the other hand, not only features the aforementioned astronaut deaths and AI simulation (“the stuff of science fiction, of Star Trek and Star Wars,” Scarpetta amusingly notes), but also plot-relevant research into 3-D-printed human organs. Watching the show sometimes feels like observing someone trying to combine two very different jigsaw puzzles; unsurprisingly, there are pieces that just don’t fit. Still, the show is worth watching for the acting alone; McEwen, especially, is a talent to watch. Viewers looking for an engaging whodunit, though, will find it a bit of a mess—and one that doesn’t bear clinical examination.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.