The dual leads are finally bringing Patricia Cornwell's famous M.E. to the screen

It's taken many years for Kay Scarpetta to arrive on television, but with Prime Video's new series, viewers get two iterations of the beloved literary character.

- BY EMILY ZEMLER

"SCARPETTA" stars Nicole Kidman, left, and Rosy McEwen learned from a real-life forensic pathologist.

In "Scarpetta," which premiered Wednesday, the forensic medical examiner is played by both Nicole Kidman and Rosy McEwen, who skillfully solve murder mysteries across two timelines.

"I'm just proud this got made," Kidman says, speaking over Zoom alongside McEwen. "It has been a long time that it has not been made. There was a reason you couldn't make it two decades ago -maybe people weren't interested, or we were just told they were not interested. But as we've shown over the course of decades now, people are interested in women in these very complicated roles." There have been several attempts to adapt Patricia Cornwell's popular series of murder mystery novels into a film and multiple actors have been attached to play Scarpetta, including Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie. But it wasn't until Jamie Lee Curtis stepped in as a producer of this series in early 2021 that an adaptation finally came to fruition.

"I was interested in the fact that such an important literary character had never been brought to a screen," Curtis says, speaking via a voice memo. "The amount of stories and books available lent itself to a template for a TV series. I went to my [producing] partner, Jason Blum, when I found out that the rights were available, which shocked me, and said to him that we should partner up and buy the rights to her books. It was as simple as that: I just felt like Kay Scarpetta needed to come to the screen." Curtis' Comet Pictures and Blumhouse Television enlisted longtime TV writer Liz Sarnoff as the showrunner. Sarnoff had read all of Cornwell's books with her mom and had what she calls a "meaningful" connection to the series. Because there were so many novels, the first of which published in 1990, Sarnoff wanted to find a way to encapsulate the 1990s timelines from the early books alongside the more contemporary ones.