The hardest-working woman in TV has another credit to add to her IMDb this week.
There are four new Nicole Kidman dramas coming in 2026 and the first arrives on Amazon Prime Video tomorrow.
Based on Patricia Cornwell’s series of novels about a criminal pathologist who brings plenty of baggage to the job, Scarpetta stars Kidman as the woman in question.
Dr Kay Scarpetta has a reputation in the world of forensics, but the grind of performing one autopsy after another is (understandably) getting to her. Just as she’s returned to take on the chief medical examiner spot for Virginia.
From the writer behind episodes of Lost and Barry, the show weaves back and forth between two timelines, in the present day with Kidman playing newly-returned Dr Scarpetta, and her younger, scrappy self in the 1990s, where the pathologist is played by Rosy McEwen.
Elsewhere on the starry cast, we have fellow screen icon Jamie Lee Curtis as Kay’s sardonic sister Dorothy (JLC doesn’t really look like a Dorothy, but ignore that), The Mentalist lead Simon Baker, Bafta’s rap star extraordinaire Ariana DeBose and owner of a new bearded dragon Bobby Cannavale.
Nicole Kidman stars as forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta (Picture: Connie Chornuk/Prime)
Jamie Lee Curtis plays her sardonic sis Dorothy (Picture: Connie Chornuk/Prime)
In the present-day timeline for the eight-parter, Dr Scarpetta is investigating a particularly gruesome set of murders, which look like the work of a serial killer and even bear freakish similarities to a case from the start of her career.
As the thriller’s trailer teases, ‘The case that made her could break her.’
The official Amazon synopsis of the show described the eight-parter as ‘chilling’, writing: ‘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.
What other shows can I watch on Amazon Prime?
The Paradise. The show follows the lives and relationships of those who shop and trade in and around England’s first-ever department store.
Young Sherlock. Guy Ritchie’s highly anticipated new series is about Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved literary detective.
Outlander. The period drama’s time-travelling final season arrives.
This should be one to fill The Mentalist gap (Picture: Connie Chornuk/Prime)
‘As Scarpetta pursues justice, she must navigate complicated relationships, including the fraught dynamic with her sister, confront long-held professional and personal grudges, and face secrets that threaten to unravel everything she’s built.’
Does Scarpetta sound like one for you?
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Kidman is never one to do jobs in half measures, so it might come as no surprise that to prepare for the part of Dr Scarpetta, she learned to conduct an actual autopsy.
Speaking to Jimmy Fallon on his talk show, she shared: ‘If I needed to, I could do the autopsy. I can remove all the organs. I can name them all.
‘I can remove the lungs, the liver and the gallbladder and the intestines.’
‘I worked with an incredible medical examiner, and I studied him,’ she revealed.
Scarpetta launches on Amazon Prime from March 11.
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The Bear is set to end after its upcoming fifth season, cast member Jamie Lee Curtis has claimed.
Late last month, the Oscar nominee appeared to let the cat out of the bag with a revealing Instagram post.
In the picture, Jamie – who plays matriarch Donna Berzatto in the comedy-drama – appeared alongside The Bear’s Abby Elliott, suggesting the actors had just finished filming a scene together.
“FINISHED STRONG!” she wrote in the caption. “Surrounded by an extraordinary crew and group of writers and producers and scene partners on the show that Chris Storer created, completing the story of this extraordinary family that we have all fallen in love with.”
Fans speculated this meant the end of the road for the popular culinary series, which Jamie has confirmed to be the case.
Earlier this week, a reporter from Access Hollywood asked the Freaky Friday star whether the post confirmed that the next series would be the last.
“Everybody’s confirmed the show is ending,” she insisted. “I don’t understand why that’s such a [big deal].
“Unless I’m gonna get a call from all the people saying, ‘You just told [everyone],’ I think everybody understood that it was the last season of the show. If it isn’t, then I’ve completely blown it.”
Although there has been no official statement from The Bear about its upcoming ending, undisclosed sources confirmed to Deadline that Jamie’s comments were accurate.
However, this news won’t come as too much of a surprise to fans of the show, as leading man Jeremy Allen White previously revealed that the show’s creator, Christopher Storer, had originally only planned for the show to run for four seasons.
Series four ended with Jeremy’s character, Carmy, leaving the restaurant and signing over his stake in it.
Despite feeling like a goodbye to The Bear, the series was soon renewed for its fifth season, although at the time there was no word if it would be the last.
Over the last three months, the cast has been spotted around Chicago, filming new scenes for the upcoming final episodes.
The Bear premiered in 2022 to huge acclaim, winning 21 Emmy awards and five Golden Globes over the course of the series, including individual acting wins for Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
There is no current release date for season five of The Bear, but you can watch all four series of The Bear on Disney + now.
Before the release of the recent James L. Brooks film Ella McCay, film fans on social media operating (as they tend to do) somewhere between genuine fandom and irony-poisoned wiseassery, extolled people to take the “Ella McCay challenge,” namely posing next to the poster for the film and imitating star Emma Mackey (yes, Emma Mackey IS Ella McCay) adjusting her shoe mid-stride.
They might have tried something less specific; the true Ella McCay challenge, it turned out, was getting anyone to show up at a theater playing Ella McCay. The film is about the title character unexpectedly ascending to the office of governor (“of the state you were born and raised in,” unnamed) after her boss (Albert Brooks) vacates the job for a cabinet position. In other words, it was never expected to be a holiday blockbuster. But it nonetheless still felt like yet another blow to the idea of grown-up movies playing in movie theaters when, during the most lucrative several weeks of the box office year, Ella McCay not only became the lowest-grossing new wide release of December but made less money than fellow 2025 releases The Alto Knights, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, or (most damning) The Weeknd’s insane vanity project Hurry Up Tomorrow. Two of those three got significantly better reviews, too.
Now that Ella McCay is arriving on Hulu, viewers will have the chance to take the challenge at home. (Maybe they can adjust their slipper midstride?) Nearly anyone streaming it will find that certain criticisms of the film ring absolutely true. First and foremost: James L. Brooks, who was an ’70s sitcom titan via The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, an ’80s Oscar darling with Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, and a ’90s shepherd of blockbusters in both cinema (As Good As It Gets) and TV (The Simpsons), does not have any of that juice in the 2020s, unless you count The Simpsons still being on and sometimes good.
Brooks seems to recognize this, too. He sets Ella McCay in late 2008, which his narrator (Julie Kavner) describes with wry knowingness as a time when people liked each other more. Uh, maybe. Which people, Jim? He doesn’t exactly name names, because despite the movie explicitly taking place during the 2008 financial crisis and cabinet-appointment season (which is to say, in the wake of the presidential election), the names “Barack Obama,” “John McCain,” or “George W. Bush” are not so much as obliquely alluded to, nevermind actually uttered. “Financial crisis” and different-styled phones are just about all you get for that ’08 feeling. The barely-subtext is that it’s set at this time because Brooks could still make sense of the world in 2008, which makes sense; after all, that was a full two years before his 2010 movie How Do You Know bombed expensively at the box office and presumably knocked some wind out of him.
The 2008 setting also allows flashbacks to Ella’s teenage years to get closer to the Brooks heyday, in the early 1990s. This would be especially convenient if any of the flashback scenes were a good idea. Instead, they have Mackey unconvincingly playing a 17-year-old in multiple scenes of hoary psychological baggage, where we learn that Ella has been let down by her philandering father (Woody Harrelson), bereaved by the death of her beloved mother (Rebecca Hall, clocking in for a single scene), and partially raised by her outspoken aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis, sometimes overdoing it). We also meet Ella’s younger brother Casey (Spike Fearn in his adult years) who later inexplicably shares a long scene with his ex-girlfriend Susan (Ayo Edebiri), a distracting break from Ella’s vantage point and a subplot that is abruptly dropped well before the movie ends.
Yes, it’s safe to say that Brooks, at the age of 85, is only slightly more convincing as a chronicler of urbane and anxious young people than Woody Allen. It’s also safe to say that against many odds, with an underdog scrappiness worthy of Governor McCay herself, Ella McCay is actually pretty charming. That is, Ella McCay herself is charming, because Emma Mackey gives what might be considered a superhuman performance in making her part seem playable at all.
The best decision Brooks makes is to build a movie about a character who plays a bit like the woman Lisa Simpson could only grow into through her show’s many what-if future-set episodes. Ella is wonky, policy-focused, serious-minded, earnest as hell, and, in classic (as well as less-than-classic) Brooks fashion, has to do a lot of thinking aloud that only superficially involves other people. Mackey plays these qualities with the slightly frazzled confidence of a screwball professional, even though the movie talks itself pretty far afield from the genuine screwball delight it could have been. Often, the movie feels like a political comedy from 1946 talking itself down from farce.
Brooks characters talk in circles without necessarily realizing they do; sometimes I’m not even sure if Brooks realizes it. It can make his movies, especially his later-period stuff, seem weirdly uneventful; in the often funny How Do You Know, half the story is predicated on the Paul Rudd character getting in legal trouble that he doesn’t understand and most of the characters refuse to explain to him. Rather than a genuine dilemma, it feels like the movie is stalling for time. Ella McCay also feels like it’s running out the clock, though at least it’s for more thematically appropriate reasons, as a scandal threatens to derail Ella’s governorship before it’s begun. (That’s another reason Brooks must have wanted to jump back to 2008; the notion that this movie’s scandal involving Ella, uh, having sex with her husband could move the needle in any way does not track nearly two decades later. In a weird way, it comes across like Brooks is a bit nostalgic for what used to look like intransigence regarding sex. This may or may not have something to do with a truly bizarre post-coital shot of Ella where she appears to be wearing a scarf or a blanket around her neck.)
But! But!!! The relationship between Ella and her prickly mentor “Governor Bill” retains some of the old-fashioned Brooks good-sitcom zing, and the movie’s take on familial forgiveness has a tartness that most comedy-dramas would never touch. Moreover, this is Mackey’s movie, as she overthinks her way toward making the whole thing feel somewhat less like it was designed by space aliens intent on quietly destroying the reputation of the state Ella was born and raised in. Not for nothing, but I took my ten-year-old daughter to this movie – it was a Christmas-movie compromise (or, per Ella’s preferred terminology, consensus) between her refusal to see Song Sung Blue and my wife’s refusal to see a SpongeBob – and she was able to lock into this talky, apolitically political comedy-drama, with a rootable heroine and some funny moments of relatable neuroses. Families used to see movies like this together all the time, I think! It’s hard to remember. 2008 was a long time ago, much less 1995. I’m not sure where exactly Ella McCay wound up taking me, but I was happy to take the challenge of being whisked away to whatever state it was born and raised in.
How To Watch Ella McCay
If you’re new to Hulu, you can get started with a 30-day free trial on the streamer’s basic (with ads) plan. After the trial period, you’ll pay $10.99/month. If you want to upgrade to Hulu ad-free, it costs $18.99/month.
If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the Disney+ Bundles, all of which include Hulu. These bundles start at $12.99/month for ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu and goes up to $32.99/month for Disney+, Hulu, and Max, all ad-free.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
