There's been fever pitch excitement building for the arrival of Scarpetta to Prime Video. Now the release date has finally arrived, making dreams come true for crime drama fans everywhere.
While many of those fans will be hugely familiar with Patricia Cornwell's source material, the 29-book Scarpetta series she's been penning since 1990, not as many will know that it's taken 37 years of failed attempts and disappointment to bring the hit character to screens.
If you're wondering why, the overriding reason is misogyny - something Dr. Kay Scarpetta is actually well versed in, ironically. But at least now the show is finally here, its excellent cast with Nicole Kidman as the titular character, can bring their A-game and do the series justice.
Speaking to Radio Times, Patricia Cornwell explains that the first book in the Scarpetta book series, Postmortem, was first optioned as a film just before publication in 1989.
What followed is a series of disappointments for the author. She wanted Jodie Foster for the role of Dr. Kay Scarpetta in 1991, but she had just released Silence of The Lambs and felt there was too much overlap between the roles.
Helen Mirren was thrown into the mix in 1997, but had the same issues as Jodie Foster as she was firmly in her Prime Suspect era.
Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon and Angelina Jolie were all attached to the role over the following years, during which time Cornwell reports writers simply couldn't understand what the forensic pathologist actually did for a job, and couldn't form the scripts.
However, despite the casting hiccups and the writing issues, Cornwell firmly believes there's an overriding reason the books took 37 years to translate to screens. "It also didn’t happen because Scarpetta isn’t a man," she says candidly.
"One bookseller told me that he couldn’t handle the idea of a woman dealing with the grim stuff that Scarpetta deals with," she continues, adding, "If Scarpetta had been a man, and someone like Tom Cruise had played him, he’d have been a household name a long time ago."
Four years ago, the formidable Jamie Lee Curtis got on board to make the Scarpetta book to TV show dream a reality.
"I called Patricia and said, 'Who has the rights to Scarpetta right now?,'" Jamie Tells EW, adding that when she was told nobody did, "I was so surprised that this incredible book series, with this fantastic lead character, had not been brought to the screen yet."
"I called Jason Blum and said 'I'd like to buy these books, and I would like to develop them for television,'" she shares.
Jamie of course, stars in the series as Kay Scarpetta's sister, Dorothy. Formidable both on and off screen, Jamie's scenes with Nicole Kidman are some of the best in the series.
She brings a frenetic, unpredictable energy to her scenes - not quite Donna Berzatto in The Bear levels manic, but still scene stealingly magnetic.
While it's taken a while for the series, based on both the first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, and 2020's Autopsy, to get their TV debut, the series mimics that feeling of slow burn.
Despite diving straight in by showing us a dead naked body with its hands removed, in the first few seconds, the pace slows and the opening episode takes a fair amount of time to set the scene and set up the multiple secrets that are to come spilling out across the eight episodes.
While it might take a while for the action to ramp up after the initial shock of the first moments, it's still interesting to see the results of nearly four decades of work to get the beloved book series to a star-studded TV adaptation.
Scarpetta airs on Prime Video from March 11.
