Balancing Multiple Tones: A Conversation with ‘Scarpetta’ Creator and Showrunner Liz Sarnoff

Scarpetta brings Patricia Cornwell's iconic literary character to life in a gripping series starring Nicole Kidman as “Dr. Kay Scarpetta.” With skilled hands and an unnerving eye, this unrelenting medical examiner is determined to serve as the voice of the victims, unmask a serial killer, and prove that her career-making case from 28 years prior isn't also her undoing. Set against the backdrop of modern forensic investigation, the series delves beyond the crime scene to explore the psychological complexities of both perpetrators and investigators, creating a multi-layered thriller that examines the toll of pursuing justice at all costs.

There are a handful of creatives, from writers to director auteurs, that you wish you could have had their career – and Elizabeth “Liz” Sarnoff is indeed one of those writers on the list. If you’re not familiar with her writing career, one, how dare you, but it’s hard to not be aware of her work ranging from writing on popular and game changing shows like J.J. Abrams’ Lost, David Milch’s Deadwood and Bill Hader’s Barry – to name just a few from her illustrious credits.

Sarnoff is adding a new feather to her cap, tackling an adaptation of the Scarpetta book series, written by Patricia Cornwell. This ‘whodunit’ crime mystery drama series really does put you on the edge of your seat, as you become completely invested with the characters and their highs and lows, past and present. And the key here are the characters. How they maneuver in their world, both with one another and with themselves. Every piece of this puzzle has a place, it’s just knowing where they fit, and Liz and her creative team have figured it all out… we just have to figure it out ourselves.

Liz Sarnoff spoke with Script about her personal connection to the Scarpetta book series, staying true to the characters’ ideals while allowing for creative liberties, how her core cast brought these characters to life, and how her past work experience has prepared her for this project.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What was it about these books that pulled you in and gave you that creative spark of wanting to adapt this into a TV show?

Liz Sarnoff: And make my life this weird horror story. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] Disclaimer, don't watch the show before bed.

Liz: We were just on a location scout looking at a particularly creepy location. I was like, 'I gotta stop writing this stuff.' [laughs]

I knew these books. I read them in the 90s when they came out, and Kay Scarpetta was sort of a character that my mother and I both loved together. We would share the books and read them together. And at the time, it was very cutting edge. The forensic... there was no CSI yet, so the forensic detail from Patricia's [Cornwell] eight years that she spent working in a morgue were incredible. And then it was also, she was a badass, and she was a boss, and it was the 90s, and none of us worked for women, and so it was just a delight to see how she navigated all that.

I loved the books, and when I heard that they were doing them, I asked for the job, because I saw that Jamie [Lee Curtis] and Blumhouse had bought the books to make a TV series. I hadn't done my own show in a long time, and I thought, ‘Well, if anything could make me want to do it again, it would be this.’ It was almost five years ago that we started on the process.

Sadie: It's a long time to live in that world and with that character. I assume you had direct access to the author, Patricia, during all that.

Liz: Yeah, she's been very involved, as far as she sees everything we do. She sees all the scripts and stuff. But I also have the books and once I decided to do the show in two timelines, it was about picking two books that would represent that.

And the books... it's incredible to have them, because the crime stories are amazing. It takes a huge load off of my plate, which is I get to then play around that a little bit. I mean, we change things here and there, just to keep everybody on their toes. But for the most part, whenever I do any adaptation, I always try to stay with the original material as much as I can, because it's been bought for a reason. [laughs]

Sadie: When you approach doing an adaptation and choosing what is important to you, but also staying true to the book series that is these books, how do you go about making those creative decisions and also staying true to Patricia’s voice?

Liz: I felt like we had a lot of material that was very high incident, which I love. It's lot of bodies dropping... I love all that, because that keeps your clock going. And then for me, it was really just about, and for Patricia, too, her biggest concern was that we were true to the characters and their main ideals. Like Kay Scarpetta cannot tolerate any kind of abuse of power. That is the principle that drives her every day of her life, and that was vitally important. And then it was like, for Marino, for Benton, for Lucy, for all of them - we had to be true to who Patricia really felt they were.

And then we were allowed to really expand on the relationships. Because in books, and Patricia said this, you don't go home with Marino, you go only go home with Kay. We decided to start doing these little flashbacks. They start in episode two. Let's show a portion of each character... what I said in the room was, this was the moment they fractured, when their psychology fractured.

And then it started to feel like those characters in the way we would do it on Lost, started to sort of guide the storytelling of the episode. Like six, for me is, in a weird way, the most esoteric episode, and it's Benton's episode, so it makes perfect sense, you know? So, it started to guide the way we told the story, in a way just going on their characters and what we were trying to show about them. And then it was also about finding a way for the two timelines to always be speaking to each other, so they don't really feel like two timelines.

Sadie: Your ability to stitch those two different timelines so seamlessly is so well done, and it works so well. You don't feel like it's not jarring. They also carry equal weight of guilt, grief, connection, disconnection. You’re on this ride and this could go in any direction. And I love that you bring up episode six, because I also love that episode. By that point, I was quietly screaming to myself, ‘Oh my god, they're all red herrings!’ I thought I knew who did it, and now I don't.

Liz: [laughs] That's great. Oh, that's awesome to hear. It's been so long since we finished shooting, and the show hasn't aired yet. Really, that's great. [laughs]

Sadie: It's working. All the hard work and all the nightmares are paying off.

Liz: [laughs] Once we started seeing the show... you know when it's gonna work and when it's not. And there's so many things in the show that could have gone wrong, but I think part of the reason it works is just our cast is so good.

Part of the reason why I think the back and forth is seamless is Nicole [Kidman] and Rosy [McEwen], they're just so, so good. And they just feel like the same person. And to have Bobby Cannavale and Jake Cannavale is quite nice. And Simon [Baker] and Hunter [Parrish] took to each other. They worked together and didn't work together, and did it as they pleased, but I really felt it was seamless between the cast.

Sadie: Did these actors rehearse a lot with each other, especially the younger and older version of the characters, to really dial in their voice, their ticks, the little nuances?

Liz: We rehearsed with them together in the beginning. Before we shot the first block, we had two weeks of rehearsal. And sometimes we would have the younger guys, sometimes we'd have the older guys, and then sometimes we would have the same character. We sort of allowed them to do it on their own, in a lot of ways, where they decided what they wanted to take from each other.

And then I think also it came a point where it was like, the character also has to be mine. A little of that goes a long way. They all met, though, and they all hung out. And obviously, Jake and Bobby, it was easy for them.

But we also worked a lot with a great medical examiner here in Tennessee. She works in Knoxville, and she turned out to be a real inspiration, I think, for Scarpetta, even though Scarpetta is based on basically a real person. But she's just a young woman who's covered in tattoos and really like Southern... she's on set all the time, and she showed Nicole and Rosy, 'This is how I do this and this is how I do that.' And they just took to her so strongly that it really made a lot of it easier, because the one place you want them to sort of be doing the same stuff is in the autopsy suite. So that was kind of fun.

Sadie: To have that access is so great. Let’s talk about the tone of the show and collaborating with the incredibly talented David Gordon Green, what genre can this guy not do? What were those conversations like between you two in terms of establishing that framework, so that other creatives, like the other directors and writers, could play in that sandbox while staying true to the tone and vision?

Liz: It's always tricky when you have a lot of tones going at once. But I think Barry was a real, as a job, was a real learning experience for me as to how much tonal shifting a show can actually take. The thing on Barry was always how dark can it be and how goofy? [laughs]

I knew there was going to be humor, there was going to be scares, and there's also a big family drama going on underneath it all. David is great, because David really lets the work come at him in a way. He's very calm and very wonderful on set, and I'd never worked with him before. But as we started to talk about the show, we just started to talk about what we liked, and how we wanted to see it, and what needed to be scary and what didn't, and when it wasn't scary, what was it? But we really just explored it together.

And then through a course of events, he ended up directing like five episodes of the first season. And Charlotte Brändström too, who was here for our second block. It all felt very cohesive in that way, and great. He's a master of scares, so that part I knew that he would get, it was more like, can we get this deep, emotional stuff that's going on with these two sisters? And he can do that too. I mean, he really can do anything.

Sadie: Speaking of the family and comedy. A specific character brought so much needed levity into the show, Kay's sister, Dorothy. She’s this relentless friction that we eventually go from ‘I am so annoyed by her’ to being absolutely in love with her and just feeling for her and rooting for her. Again, balancing those two things and of course, having Jamie Lee Curtis bringing her to life.

Liz: Jamie is utterly amazing. She sold these books to Blumhouse because she's known Patricia for a really long time, and they're friends, and she was not planning on being in it. And then when Nicole came on, she basically said, 'You're going to be in it, right? You should play my sister.' And it sort of changed the whole show for all of us. It became much more of a family outing.

I think the thing that we all realized about Dorothy early on was that she's such an enormous pain in the ass, and she's so loud, but she's always right. Her advice is right. Everything she's saying about Lucy from the beginning of the show to the end is absolutely on point. It's just her presentation is so freaking annoying. Once we realized we were doing that unconsciously, we made a conscious decision to keep doing it because it helps.

The fact that she's never really said anything that wasn't absolutely true, she's just saying too much. [laughs] And she can't have a thought without expressing it, and that's just her character.  She's not in the books that much, but she's a real wild card whenever she shows up.

Jamie being on set is a jolt of energy to your day. So, it does the same thing on screen that it does for us when we're shooting, because she's full of life and energy and excitement for everything. We worked on her look with our costume designer, and we wanted her to be kind of outrageous. And I think we've accomplished it. [laughs] Lucy was put off by it too. She doesn't really know where to put her mother in her daily life, it's always too much for her. It's always frying her circuits.

Sadie: The pilot episode, you start laying the ground work for some easter eggs, like the line “Honest Abe” and the flattened pennies, it really begs for viewers to go back and watch again.

Liz: There's definitely easter eggs. For me, it was fun. There's definitely little things that you might miss the first time that you go back and pick up. And I think the show would be fun to watch a second time, just because once you know what actually happened, it gives you a whole other perspective. But that part is fun for me.

Ever since writing Lost easter eggs, they just come into my brain. [laughs] But I'm also huge sci-fi fan, so I love genre storytelling and all that. And I do feel like the addition of AI Janet in the show, really brings that sort of weird genre element. And what I like about that is that it opens the world of possibility... That's all in Patricia's writing, she's always been very cutting edge on the technology of the world. And I loved the inclusion of it in the books. And I thought, we have to make it a part of the show, because it'll make the show more delicious, I think, to have that than not have it, then just be a regular, dry procedural.

Sadie: You've had quite the career in TV, where you've produced and wrote and collaborated with some of the best of the best out there, and you’ve also dabbled in a lot of different genres. How much of that past work, cutting your teeth, has essentially teed you up to take on this series?

Liz: Absolutely. I definitely had that feeling because I did write the pilot for a long time. I do feel like I draw on all of it. I wrote on a Western, I wrote on Lost, I did weird shows, and a lot of procedurals. After I finished with that, I started working on shows where I wanted to meet the creator. So, I did that pirate show [Crossbones] that Neil Cross did, just because I wanted to sit and talk to him every day, [laughs] stuff like that.

And a lot of reasons why I did Barry, was just because Bill [Hader] was very engaging. And I thought, ‘I'll learn a lot from this guy.’ And I'd never done a comedy before, but if I hadn't done Barry, I never could have done this show. The balance of tone would have been too intimidating for me, I think. And if I hadn't done Lost, I don't think I would have understood the genre part of it. If I hadn't done Deadwood, I wouldn't have understood the sort of desperate people who are hurt, who still reach out for more, who still want to love and live and have some joy in their heart and some spirit in their life.

It all helped me. That's the beauty of having a long career, is that you get to learn so much, particularly as a writer. Because you have to absorb these things completely in order to just be able to sit back and then let it write, because it's like you have to do the research first, and then the creative part. I'm grateful. I was very lucky in my career, because I met David Milch very early on, and he really set me off on an amazing track.

Every one of those shows has been an unbelievable learning experience. And it’s sort of what's missing from the business now is that people are... and it was back in the day where you always went to set, you stayed on for the whole show, and you went to set and you did all the jobs, so you understood. I never learned to become a showrunner. I just did it so long... it's apprentice and master stuff, and it's really lacking at the moment, unfortunately.

Scarpetta premieres on March 11, 2026, exclusively on Prime Video.