Yahoo Lifestyle High Potential Review: An Inspired Kaitlin Olson Elevates ABC’s Brainy Crime Procedural
Another fall TV season is upon us, which means a fresh batch of network procedurals that can roughly be described as The ____ Who Solves Crimes. (Lucifer, The Devil Who Solves Crimes! Sleepy Hollow, The Ichabod Crane Who Solves Crimes!) ABC’s latest entry in the genre, High Potential — premiering Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 10/9c; I’ve seen the first three episodes — is basically The Genius Single Mom Who Solves Crimes, and it honestly doesn’t do much to reinvent the procedural wheel. But it’s still a satisfying underdog tale with a sly sense of humor, thanks to a fantastic lead performance from Kaitlin Olson.
Olson stars as Morgan, a single mom juggling three kids who works as a cleaning lady at the LAPD’s Major Crimes department. She’s dusting desks and bopping along to her headphones one night when she discovers a break in a case they’re working on, writing it out for them to see the next morning, Good Will Hunting-style. At first, the cops bristle at Morgan’s brazen overstepping, but they learn that she actually has an IQ of 160 and an uncanny ability to spot odd details that have slipped through the cracks. (She’s like Sherlock Holmes in a fuzzy animal-print coat.) So they strike up a partnership, with Morgan using her formidable intellect to help the cops solve cases that have left them stumped.
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With a pilot script from Lost and Daredevil alum Drew Goddard (and based on a French series), High Potential is more lighthearted than grim, closer to Monk or Psych than Criminal Minds. Morgan is a walking Wikipedia, citing local meteorological patterns and ancient history to help nail each week’s culprit. (We get to peek inside her complex thought process through crisp crime-scene reenactments.) She’s also blunt, arrogant and stubborn, rubbing the cops the wrong way at almost every turn — she’s annoyed, actually, that everybody else doesn’t see the solution as quickly as she does — but she gets results. And seeing her run intellectual circles around a room full of veteran detectives without breaking a sweat is a fun, fizzy treat.
The crimes here are pretty pedestrian, with suspects confessing at convenient times, but Olson’s mischievous glee elevates the whole show. Morgan is a unlikely crime-solver: She looks like she spends her nights drinking wine and watching Bravo, but she’s actually watching documentaries and accumulating obscure trivia. She doesn’t see her big brain as a gift, though. More of a compulsion, actually: “If I see a mistake, I need to correct it.” It’s a great role for Olson, whose comedy chops are well-honed from her time on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Mick. Here, she not only fires off sarcastic one-liners with ease, but she also shows a surprising vulnerability in Morgan’s chaotic home life, hinting at a mysterious past trauma that she has long since buried.
The rest of the characters are thinly drawn so far — Daniel Sunjata plays Morgan’s reluctant LAPD detective partner, with Judy Reyes as a more sympathetic cop — and the episodes tend to fall into predictable patterns. (The cops doubt Morgan, she proves them wrong, rinse and repeat.) There’s a larger mystery here, too, of course, about why the father of Morgan’s oldest child vanished, because every TV drama is required to have a larger mystery to slowly peel away. But despite its formulaic tendencies, High Potential works on the strength of Olson’s joyful performance. It’s still a network procedural, at the end of the day, but it’s smart and funny enough to be a particularly good one.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Kaitlin Olson is fantastic as an unlikely genius in ABC’s lighthearted new crime procedural High Potential.
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