{"id":528189,"date":"2026-03-17T05:21:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528189\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T05:21:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:21:11","slug":"what-dr-kays-crime-means-for-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528189\/","title":{"rendered":"What Dr Kay’s Crime Means for Season 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season one finale of Scarpetta<\/a>, \u201cBridge of Time, Part Two.\u201d]<\/p>\n

\n\tDr. Kay Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman<\/a>) has just become the kind of cold-blooded killer that she has spent her entire life trying to bring to justice.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Prime Video\u2019s adaptation of Patricia Cornwell\u2019s bestselling crime novels, Kay returns to the Commonwealth of Virginia to reassume the role of Chief Medical Examiner, the same office she had once occupied in her early 30s. Ambitiously told across two timelines, the eight-episode first season<\/a>, adapting Cornwell\u2019s Postmortem and Autopsy, finds Kay investigating a new female-targeting serial killer while wrestling with the guilt over a big secret that cast a dark cloud over her first major case with a similar MO decades earlier. (Kidman<\/a> plays the protagonist in the present day, while Rosy McEwen plays her in the late \u201990s<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe seventh episode finally reveals the dark secret that has bonded Kay with her detective brother-in-law Pete Marino (played by Bobby Cannavale<\/a> in the present day, and Cannavale\u2019s real-life son Jacob Lumet in the past). In the \u201990s, Kay correctly deduced that the elusive serial killer was Roy McCorckle, a 9-1-1 dispatcher who had answered all of the calls of his future female murder victims. Without any back-up, Kay went to visit Roy\u2019s home, where she found a screaming woman gagged and bound on his bed. In the ensuing confrontation, Roy attempted to strangle Kay to death, but she managed to kill him in self-defense.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, before any other officers could arrive on the scene, Pete made the rash decision to cover up Kay\u2019s involvement by shooting the serial killer\u2019s body a couple more times. Kay is then forced not only to conduct an autopsy on the same man she killed, but also to lie about her findings. \u201cIn the past, Kay does what her instinct tells her to do. She hears a woman screaming and she goes into help,\u201d showrunner Liz Sarnoff tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cIt\u2019s actually Marino who makes the decision to take the blame for it and traps her in a situation she doesn\u2019t want to be in. She would\u2019ve probably more likely just been honest about it. But once he does that, it starts a cycle of events that they then have to lie about for 25 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat long-buried secret ultimately puts a strain on all of Kay\u2019s familial relationships in the present. Pete, who has always had feelings for Kay, opts to move out of their shared house and stay in a hotel with his wife, Kay\u2019s flighty sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis)<\/a>. Kay\u2019s niece, Lucy (Ariana DeBose), turns her back on her aunt after Kay disapproved of the way Lucy was grieving the death of her wife Janet (Janet Montgomery) with an AI bot. Meanwhile, Kay\u2019s FBI profiler husband, Benton Wesley (Simon Baker), who has been struggling with demons of his own, asks Kay for a divorce after she refuses to apologize for lying to him and then dismisses his worst fears about himself.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBy the end of the last episode, every single person has walked away from her. She\u2019s entirely alone when the killer comes to get her,\u201d Sarnoff adds. Kay is last seen with blood splattered all over her face after beating to death the present-day serial killer, Officer August Ryan (David Hornsby) \u2014 who broke into her house to thwart her investigation \u2014 with a baseball bat. To complicate matters further, a shadowy figure then opens the front door to Kay\u2019s residence, catching her in the throes of a crime of passion in the season\u2019s final moments.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn September 2024, Prime Video officially picked up the TV adaptation of Scarpetta with an order for two eight-episode seasons<\/a>. After wrapping filming last March on the first season, Sarnoff reveals to THR that her writers room has already penned seven episodes for next season, which just began production this week in Nashville. (Filming will continue into the summer, with the series likely to return around this time next year.)<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, Sarnoff opens up about her personal connection to Scarpetta, how she developed the messy love triangles between the fundamentally broken characters at the heart of the series \u2014 and her plans for next season, which will adapt Cornwell\u2019s Cruel and Unusual and The Body Farm.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tScarpetta was put into development and officially announced without a showrunner already attached in 2021, and you immediately had your agent reach out to put your hat in the ring. What was your pitch? How do you think your take on this adaptation differed from other writers who have tried unsuccessfully to tackle this material?<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Patricia always said, she liked that I had actually read the books. I had a real emotional connection to these books. I read them with my mother in the \u201990s. It was a series we would read to each other; we would send the books back and forth. There were no big female bosses back then [in fiction] or anything like that, and she was a really fully realized character. She was everything that a woman is, but also did this insane job [as a medical examiner] and then solved crimes. So I pitched my love to them for the series of books, and my desire to stay loyal to it and not screw it up too much, hopefully. It took a while, but I think I really sold it when I came up with the idea to do the show in two time periods.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy did you choose to tell the show across two different timelines?<\/p>\n

\n\t[Like Kay] I remember myself in my 30s. I was just starting out in this business, but at the same time I was doing Deadwood and I thought I was an old, seasoned pro. I look back on that time now, and I\u2019m like, \u201cWow, I didn\u2019t know anything.\u201d Now I\u2019m doing it again 25 years later, and it\u2019s a very different experience. Patricia had started putting out books that were in a later time period, and I thought to really do this right, you want to see the character talking to herself in both timelines. Because there was so much material, it felt like the right way to do this show was to put as much in as you could and try to find a way to mete it out over eight episodes.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPast Kay (Rosy McEwen) and past Marino (Jake Cannavale).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tConnie Chornuk \/ Prime \u00a9 Amazon Content Services LLC<\/p>\n

\n\tWhereas Kay and Dorothy\u2019s father died of leukemia in the novels, the show reveals that Kay watched her father die by a gunshot wound in front of her \u2014 and Dorothy watched the aftermath through a glass window. Why did you choose to make that key change to their backstory?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the writers room, we came up with the idea of doing these flashbacks for each character, and we looked at it as the moment they all broke. When I talked to Patricia about the death, I said, \u201cFor a TV show, we want to make it visually dramatic.\u201d Him dying in a backroom of leukemia and her caring for him didn\u2019t feel like it was going to play, so we came up with the idea of there being a robbery and Kay seeing it. When we see her as a kid over the body and then cut to a scene with her as an adult with a million bodies around her, you start to understand she\u2019s never gotten out of that moment, in the way traumatic moments stay with us.<\/p>\n

\n\tDorothy is not as affected by the events \u2014 she\u2019s a different persona \u2014 and I got the idea that seeing it through the window gave her a degree of removal that created her personality. She\u2019s still doing the same thing. She goes out that night, and she has sex with that guy. And now, her trauma is that anytime anything gets serious or real or too emotional, she goes out and has sex and fucks it up. So it made sense to me that it was the same incident, but how you receive the incident is everything.<\/p>\n

\n\tJamie was only supposed to executive produce Scarpetta, but Nicole confirmed to me that she basically forced Jamie\u2019s hand to play Dorothy. In retrospect, I don\u2019t think anyone else could have played the way Dorothy shimmies around the dead bodies at the Medical Examiner\u2019s office quite like Jamie did. Did you work with her at all to find the distinctive look and physicality of the character?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe definitely talked about the look a lot. The look in the books is always pretty outrageous, but once Jamie realized she was doing it, she was very clear about how she wanted to come off and what she wanted to wear. A show like this is so lucky to have a character like that, because otherwise it\u2019s unrelentingly dark. So it was really a joy to have those scenes, and nobody knew until their first scene together what they were going to be like together. That\u2019s always a crapshoot on set. And from the first second they started arguing, we were all in heaven.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you think about evolving the sisterly relationship between Kay and Dorothy then?<\/p>\n

\n\tLucy is a big part of that. It\u2019s very hard because she\u2019s not Kay\u2019s child, and Dorothy buggers off to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. Although Kay\u2019s not the real parent and that\u2019s where Dorothy rules, Kay has a lot of opinions about [how Lucy is grieving]. Kay feels a real obligation to Lucy because, in her head, [Lucy] wouldn\u2019t want to be raised by Dorothy. I don\u2019t think anybody would really want to be raised by Dorothy. Kay didn\u2019t even want to be raised by her own mother. Kay\u2019s trying to be this other thing, and at the same time, she has enormous resentment [toward Dorothy] because she has this massive career and didn\u2019t have children herself, and now she\u2019s still responsible.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhose idea was it to cast two generations of Cannavales to play Pete?<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce we were talking to Bobby and we realized Jake existed, it was a no-brainer. (Laughs.) Casting doubles is hard, and we double a lot of people in the show. We were very lucky with Rosy [McEwen], because the physical similarities are so strong, but Bobby and Jake really are the same. So once we saw him in the part, we were like, \u201cThis is perfect,\u201d because he really will become Bobby one day.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKay Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) in the season one finale. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tConnie Chornuk \/ Prime \u00a9 Amazon Content Services LLC<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving all of the characters of this dysfunctional family under one roof really feels like the ultimate pressure cooker \u2014 especially when you add in the additional complication that Dorothy\u2019s husband Pete was in love with Kay, but Kay fell quickly for Benton. How did you think about building out this love square of sorts?<\/p>\n

\n\tTriangles are always the best thing to have in a show. Lost [one of Sarnoff\u2019s most notable writing credits] lived and died on its love triangles. I knew it would help us to have a lot of them. Even Lucy-Dorothy-Kay are a love triangle, so it was just about spinning the triangles a little bit. Also, it\u2019s about different kinds of love. There is a real love between Kay and Marino, and the journey for them is to figure out exactly what that is. Sometimes it\u2019s friendship, but it feels like more \u2014 or it feels more comfortable than maybe your marriage in that moment. But the reality is, that\u2019s a friendship. That\u2019s why it feels so good. So [the show\u2019s] about them figuring out who they are with each other. Kay and Benton, at the point we meet them, have been together a long time and faced a lot of demons together. Marino is also happier in his life. Kay and Benton are way more tortured, which is why they seem like a good couple. You just don\u2019t know. It\u2019s that thing that we all experience in life, like, \u201cWait, is this person right for me?\u201d And if they stay in your life long enough, you continue to wrestle with it.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou created little cracks in both marriages this season, but Kay and Benton\u2019s union seems to be on really thin ice by the end of the season. Does Benton really want a divorce?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn that [finale] scene where he says, \u201cI want a divorce,\u201d he tries to open himself to her, and she won\u2019t listen to it. I think the dismissiveness with which she takes this genuine confession from him \u2014 in the moment, he\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019m not even a person [to you], so I want out.\u201d I don\u2019t think he goes into that scene thinking, \u201cI\u2019m going to ask for a divorce.\u201d I think he goes into that scene thinking, \u201cI\u2019m going to tell her the truth about me, and maybe she\u2019ll tell me the truth about her.\u201d Instead, she says, \u201cI don\u2019t want to hear any of this,\u201d and that\u2019s the thing that turns him.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe flashbacks to child Benton are pretty disturbing. His mother gave him a book called Why They Kill: Characteristics of Sexual Homicide as a child, and he holds on to a photo of a murdered woman from that book almost like a security blanket when he needs to self-soothe.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think it was the moment where he broke, where his trauma was really settled on him. For Benton, this was his mother saying to him, \u201cThere\u2019s something wrong with you.\u201d You don\u2019t show a book like that to an 11-year-old and tell them that they might be a psychopath, but she was a crazy shrink and did it. She filled him with doubt about his insides, and that has stayed with him [until] the scene in the truck where he\u2019s saying, \u201cI have these urges and I want to do these things. I don\u2019t know that I can trust myself, because my mother thought I was a psychopath.\u201d So it all connected, and the fun part now of season two is going to be to start that process with Hunter [Parrish], younger Benton.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere did the idea of Lucy\u2019s dead wife Janet coming back to life as an AI bot come from?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat comes from [Cornwell\u2019s] book Autopsy. In the book, her wife and son died, I think, of COVID, but I thought it was too weighty to give her a dead kid. I felt like you couldn\u2019t move forward from that. So [we killed] the wife, and then we cast Janet Montgomery, who\u2019s a good friend of mine. The thing I love about Janet is her incredible sweetness and humanity, and I thought, If this AI character is actually the most human of them all in their own way and opens up the humanity of the other characters, that\u2019d be cool. That was how we went about writing her.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNicole Kidman with Jamie Lee Curtis<\/a> in Scarpetta.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tConnie Chornuk\/Prime<\/p>\n

\n\tOut of curiosity, can you confirm that Dorothy and Pete got together on Lucy and Janet\u2019s wedding night?<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, yeah. We see them meet, actually, in season two in the past, but that\u2019s the first time they ever get together.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show mentions they are newlyweds. How long exactly have they been together?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been two years.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe finale reveals that the real Janet died of an aneurysm, and her AI bot is now gone too. Who deleted her code? Did the AI self-destruct?<\/p>\n

\n\tLucy thinks it\u2019s either Dorothy or Kay, so she\u2019s holding onto that anger as we head into season two. But we will reveal who it was next season.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe finale also reveals that the killer in the present-day timeline is Officer Ryan. Did you ever consider changing the culprits for the murders in either timeline?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe culprit in the past is the same culprit in the book, and we changed the one in the present. I felt like he was the right guy, from very early on, to turn out to be the murderer in the present, and we could show just enough of him to make that work. The way it works is that his origin story, his flashback, is in episode one because his [villainous] turn comes when he sees [the initial victim] Lori Petersen\u2019s body. That\u2019s the first [crime] scene he\u2019s been to like that, and that starts his journey into darkness. But we don\u2019t know it yet, because that character continues in the past for the rest of the show, and we get to watch his journey now from there.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow early on did you settle on that big, bloody cliffhanger, with Kay beating Ryan to death?<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, very early on. Because Benton has been struggling all season to say, \u201cI\u2019m dark inside,\u201d I really wanted to show her how dark she is [herself] so that now what she\u2019s struggling with a little bit in season two is, \u201cI bashed that guy\u2019s head in and he was already dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSince you were already picked up for season two, for continuity purposes, did you guys film an extended take of that final scene to reveal who opened the door?<\/p>\n

\n\tNo.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo who knows about the identity of the person who opened that door?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe writers know. (Laughs.)<\/p>\n

\n\tHave we met this person before, or is this a completely new character that will be introduced next season?<\/p>\n

\n\tOh no, you\u2019ve seen them before.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat else can you say about where the second season will pick up?<\/p>\n

\n\tSeason two picks up pretty soon after the events of episode eight of season one [the finale] in the present day. In the past, it picks up a little bit later. Because we were able to reveal the murder in episode seven, we were able to resolve all that stuff. But because the emotional storytelling is the key to the present, we didn\u2019t want to miss a lot of the aftermath of that. We do two books a season \u2014 season one, we did Postmortem and Autopsy, and this year we\u2019re doing Cruel and Unusual and The Body Farm. So the stories definitely start to pick up, and murders happen. Cruel and Unusual, [set] in the past, is a story that involves a prisoner who\u2019s executed, so it gives us a different setting to roll into at the top of the season.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think [next] season is more, for the present-day characters, what their journey is like without each other to some degree, because they\u2019ve all split. So the question is: Do they end up getting back together? Do those splits hold, and who really is right for whom? It\u2019s an exploration for them more on their own at the top of the season before they\u2019re all brought back together.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKay Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) in season one. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tConnie Chornuk \/ Prime \u00a9 Amazon Content Services LLC<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you settle on Cruel and Unusual and The Body Farm as the next books for this adaptation?<\/p>\n

\n\tThis show, for me, has been a real labor of love. I learned early on that I have to stay with my instincts and be strong about that. I read the first eight books again, and I thought these two really speak to each other, and it\u2019ll be really interesting if we can make them work together. I didn\u2019t want to get too far into the series \u2014 those are actually books four and five of [Cornwell\u2019s] series \u2014 so I took a step back from the present day books and thought, \u201cLet\u2019s do a past book with the present-day cast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYour take on Scarpetta landed a two-season straight-to-series order at Amazon, which is almost unheard of in today\u2019s TV landscape.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat was [because of] Nicole. (Laughs.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, yes, the pairing of Nicole and Jamie together. Given that Patricia has published nearly 30 books in this series, do you have a multi-season plan beyond the two seasons at hand?<\/p>\n

\n\tI have no plans. I\u2019m thrilled to be making the second one now. There are so many books. As we shot the first season and worked on it, I wasn\u2019t thinking about what to do for season two. And then I really took a little bit of time to go through the books again and figure out what would be the best way, because the past and the present have to speak to each other in the show \u2014 or the show doesn\u2019t work. So it\u2019s important that the cases and the people involved with them have some connections throughout that we can see and understand. I have read all the books, so I do know them, but I reread them all the time. It\u2019s very helpful. To have these books is such a gift, because Patricia writes a fascinating crime story \u2014 great clue trail, great murderers.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you have a specific number of seasons in mind, or are you just going to take it season by season?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ll do it as long as they want to do it.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tThe full first season of Scarpetta is now streaming on Prime Video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season one finale of Scarpetta, \u201cBridge of Time, Part Two.\u201d] Dr.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[150920,88,20055,7689,162462],"class_list":{"0":"post-528189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bobby-cannavale","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jamie-lee-curtis","11":"tag-nicole-kidman","12":"tag-scarpetta"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}