'Scarpetta' review: Nicole Kidman is great, but dual-timeline structure complicates this series

WHAT IT'S ABOUT It seems like Nicole Kidman is everywhere these days. She headlines multiple series each year, turns up in a solid collection of movies, and tells us about how "heartbreak feels good in a place like this" before every AMC Theaters showing.

The star keeps up her torrid pace in the streaming world by headlining "Scarpetta," an eight-episode Prime Video adaptation of the Patricia Cornwell crime novel series.

Kidman plays forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, Virginia's chief medical examiner, investigating murders that seem to have ties to a case she examined decades earlier, during her first stint in the position.

Rosy McEwen ("The Alienist") plays that 1990s version of Scarpetta. Other cast members include Jamie Lee Curtis as Kay's older sister Dorothy; Bobby Cannavale as Pete Marino, a retired detective and Dorothy's husband; Simon Baker as Kay's husband Benton Wesley, an FBI agent; and Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose ("West Side Story") as Dorothy's daughter Lucy Farinelli-Watson, a computer expert.

The series arrives courtesy of the TV veteran Liz Sarnoff, who played significant behind-the-scenes roles in "Lost" and "Deadwood."

MY SAY "Scarpetta" takes a perfectly sufficient crime drama premise and overcomplicates it to the point where it becomes hard to watch.

A screening of the first three episodes reveals that it looks great, with the visual style offering a strong sense of Scarpetta's world on the streets, in the lab and at home, both in the '90s and today.

It would be hard to dream up a better cast. Kidman is dependable as ever; McEwen does such a strong impression of a younger version of the star that it's almost like looking in a mirror. Curtis and DeBose add a touch of comic relief; Cannavale and Baker have plenty of charisma.

But the dual timeline structure seriously hampers any momentum when it comes to grabbing and maintaining the audience's interest. We jump back and forth between the '90s and the present so consistently that the show starts to feel fractured and discordant. There's a relatively simple story at the center of the show — Scarpetta's investigation increasingly calls into question conclusions she reached in that earlier investigation — and yet it becomes hopelessly muddled with all the time shifting.

Add into the mix all these characters, both in the present day and their younger selves, and the need to give them as complete of a backstory as possible, and you're really juggling a lot of different threads. That's not to mention that we occasionally jump back even earlier, to a seminal moment in Scarpetta's childhood.

In case all that weren't enough, we have a visit to some sort of "grief cult," an AI version of a Lucy's late wife who gets a lot of screentime, and other weird touches that only further distract from the main story.

BOTTOM LINE Murder mystery obsessives will want to check out "Scarpetta," but it's a waste of time for the rest of us.