Stream It Or Skip It: ‘High Potential’ On ABC, Where A Woman With A 160 IQ But A Messy Home Life Helps The LAPD Solve Murders

Kaitlin Olson has proven to audiences over the years that she can play roles that have a lot more depth than Sweet Dee on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia . In fact, a lot of her role as Deborah Vance’s daughter DJ on Hacks showed that she can bring some dramatic depth to her comedic roles. Now she’s leading the latest in a string of “quirky crime-solver” network procedurals, as a woman whose life is a mess despite being labeled a person of “High Intellectual Potential.”

Where To Watch Kaitlin Olson’s New Show ‘High Potential’: Streaming Info, Start Time, Hulu Release Date

Opening Shot: A woman turns off the lights and leaves her house, dressed in high-heel boots and wearing headphones.

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The Gist: Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson) isn’t going out for the night; she’s going to her overnight job cleaning up at an LAPD station. As she cleans and bops along to the music she’s listening to, she knocks over a file from a murder investigation. As she looks at the pictures in the file, she looks on the case board, crosses out the word “SUSPECT” under one of the photos and writes “VICTIM.”

The next morning, Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) comes in and gets briefed on the progress in the case, as is Selena (Judy Reyes), his lieutenant. When Karadec notices the changed case board, he wants to know who did it.

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In the meantime, we see Morgan at the supermarket with her baby son, her middle son Elliot (Matthew Lamb) and her teenage daughter Ava (Amirah J). Morgan — and Elliot — are so good with numbers she has exact change for her full shopping cart; that’s how she knows Ava threw in a tube of lip gloss. She gets help with the kids from her neighbor Henry (Tom Butler), especially after she split with Ludo (Taran Killam), the father of the younger two kids.

After seeing her on CCTV footage, Kadarec brings Morgan in, and Selena asks her how she knew that the missing suspect is actually a victim. Morgan cites a bunch of things that the police didn’t notice, like a missing curtain tie-back. She has this obsession with setting things right, or else she spirals and can’t sleep.

Kaderec wants to lock her up, especially after she and Ludo, who was picking her up, get into a tussle with a couple of officers, but some of the observations Morgan made lead Selena to have her tag along with Kaderec. What Morgan tells Selena is that she has a 160 IQ and a photographic memory that retains facts. In school, she was considered a “High Potential Intellectual,” but the constant chatter in her head has not been an asset in her life, especially since Ava’s dad disappeared fifteen years prior.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? High Potential , created by Drew Goddard, is an American remake of the French series HIP – High Intellectual Potential . Both shows are in the “quirky crime-solver” vein we’ve seen a lot of lately, like Elsbeth , Will Trent , and Poker Face .

Our Take: The pilot for High Potential is almost exactly the same as the pilot for the French original, right down to the song Morgan rocks out to in the first scene. The murder plot is exactly the same, as are the pieces of evidence that Morgan points out that the police missed, like the direction of the wind in an altered doorbell camera video.

Really, the case in the first episode isn’t all that germane to how much we enjoyed High Potential ; we knew exactly what was going to happen, given we saw the French pilot. But we were so entertained with Olson as Morgan that the mystery really didn’t matter.

This role is right in Olson’s wheelhouse, someone who’s smart but deeply flawed, sharp and funny but in lots of internal turmoil. She does a fantastic job of showing just how Morgan has been able to scrape by and use her smarts in practical ways, being a good mom to her three kids.

As we mentioned in our review of the French original, Morgan’s skill isn’t as much that she’s insanely smart; it’s that she absorbs and processes information in a way that she can make observations “normie” cops and other observers can’t. Sometimes, the observations are pretty obvious, like the missing tie-back in an otherwise pristinely appointed house. Others, though, are attributable to the way she can instantly recall information she has read about or seen on documentaries, and how she can apply it to the case at hand.

The cops that Morgan is helping seem like stock police procedural characters, though we have a lot of hope that Reyes can bring her usual combination of street smarts and empathy to Selena. She’s the one who is in Morgan’s corner from the start, and she’ll likely be Morgan’s ally as Kaderec and others get ticked off at Morgan’s unorthodox investigation methods, some of which aren’t exactly legal.

Yes, the show has potential to be silly as hell. But, as with Elsbeth , the characters and cast are entertaining enough that we don’t really care if the mysteries Morgan is solving are completely bogus.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Selena agrees to Morgan’s demand: She’ll join the LAPD as a consultant if they help her find Ava’s father.

Sleeper Star: Taran Killam is inspired casting as Ludo; instead of being a jerky ex, he’s more of a guy who just is too passive to be able to deal with everything Morgan brings to the table. He seems to be a good guy, however. Garret Dillahunt will also have a recurring role, though we don’t see him in the pilot.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Let’s be very clear: You are not going to say anything, you are not going to touch anything, and you’re not going to do anything,” Kaderec says to Morgan before they go into the apartment of the missing woman’s sister. We all know that she’s going to ignore it, so why say it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. High Potential rides on how appealing Kaitlin Olson is as the show’s lead, with an assist by the ever-reliable Judy Reyes. Are the mysteries any good? Probably not.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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