Stream It Or Skip It: ‘HIP – High Intellectual Potential’ On Hulu, About A Rebellious Mom With A High IQ Who Helps The Police With Murder Cases

This fall, ABC is debuting High Potential , a comedic crime procedural starring Kaitlin Olson. She plays a mom whose personal life is in disarray but has an IQ of 160 and a keen observational eye that helps police solve murder cases. The French series that High Potential is based on has just been added to Hulu.

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Opening Shot: A woman turns off the lights in her house and walks out, dressed in a short skirt and heels, as if she’s going to a club.

The Gist: In reality, Morgane Alvaro (Audrey Fleurot) is going to her job cleaning police headquarters overnight. As she cleans and rocks out to the music on her headphones, she knocks over the files for an active case: A man was killed with a shotgun and his wife, an attorney, is missing. Morgane looks at the file and the pictures, goes over to the board with info on the case, scratches out “suspect” under the lawyer’s picture and writes “victim.”

As Detective Adam Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) briefs his boss, Céline Hazan (Marie Denarnaud), on the progress of the investigation, he notices what Morgane wrote. After looking at the security footage, they bring her in for questioning, and she reveals details in the photos that the police missed that indicates that the lawyer was kidnapped.

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Before she’s brought in, though, we see Morgane food shopping with her three kids. She is able to calculate the bill in her head, which is how she knows her oldest, Théa (Cypriane Gardin), threw something in the cart. She’s raising the kids, whom she’s had with a few different men, on her own.

When they find security footage from the scene of the crime, Morgane notices that the wind is moving in the wrong direction for the date stamp. All of these observations lead Hazan to ask Morgane how she knows all of this. Apparently, Morgane has a 160 IQ, which in school labels her as “HIP”, or “High Intellectual Potential.” But she’s never found that being that smart has helped her in life — especially not in relationships — and she has a bit of a problem with authority.

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Case in point: She gets into a scuffle with cops at the station she overhears calling her a “tart”; in exchange for not levying charges, Hazan tells Morgane that she’s going to help Karadec with the investigation. Of course, Karadec is none too happy about this, and is even less so when Morgane obtains a letter from the lawyer’s office without going through proper procedures first. But he changes his mind when her instincts start proving correct.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? HIP – High Intellectual Potential , which debuted in France in 2021, is in the grand TV tradition of underestimated civilian investigators helping police solve murders. It’s the same tradition that gave us Murder, She Wrote and Elsbeth ; . HIP – High Intellectual Potential is also the basis for the new ABC fall series High Potential , starring Kaitlin Olson.

Our Take: There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about HIP – High Intellectual Potential . Here, the “twist” is that the underestimated civilian helping the police is a genius who seems to have never found a use for her intelligence. In other words, her life would be the same mess no matter what her IQ was.

In actuality, though, Morgane’s skills aren’t as much about being super smart and able to absorb a lot of information; it’s about how she processes the information and sees things differently than most. It’s more or less what Sherlock Holmes did 170 years ago, which is combine observations about a scene with their knowledge of human behavior to come up with theories that “normie” cops couldn’t. If anything, Morgane’s ability to make observations others don’t is more of a case of neurodivergence working in conjunction with her intelligence. But the show isn’t looking to make such a nuanced characterization.

Morgane is given a backstory, as we learn by the end of the episode; Théa’s father went missing right around the time she was born, and was never found. Morgane joining the police as a consultant is contingent on them helping her find him. That is a more recent “grand tradition” on case-of-the-week mystery shows, where there has to be a continuing backstory bubbling in the background. As we saw with Elsbeth this past season, that backstory isn’t always necessary, and sometimes takes away from our enjoyment of a show. The jury is out on whether HIP ‘s continuing story is going to help the show or hurt it.

We enjoyed Fleurot’s performance as Morgane, which is a key to how successful a series like this is; the cases are not going be nearly as memorable as the character solving them, and Morgane is quite the character. Hopefully, the detectives she’s helping will become less like the stereotypical stubborn cop married to procedure that we see on most of these shows, but that might be too much to hope for from this show.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Hazan agrees to look for Théa’s father in order to get Morgane to start working with the police as a consultant.

Sleeper Star: Cypriane Gardin’s Théa is not going to be the typical surly TV teen, which is always refreshing to see.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of Morgane’s observations, like the missing tie-back on the curtains, seem so obvious, you have to wonder if she happens to be working for France’s worst police detectives.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As usual, shows like HIP – High Intellectual Potential hinge on how enjoyable it is to watch the civilian helping the police solve crimes. And in this case, Audrey Fleurot’s spirited performance as Morgane Alvaro is encouraging.

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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