So you imply to inform me there’s a procedural collection starring Kaitlin Olson known as High Potential that’s not about her fixing crimes whereas excessive?!
It’s not that Olson is synonymous with stoner tradition a lot as recognized—beloved, even—for characters who blunder by means of uncommon conditions with underachieving but successful gusto. She performs, most notably on the sitcoms It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Hacks, with a comic book fearlessness that will be wasted on a extra inventory character. Surely, then, there should be some twist to her community crime-solver past plugging her into the modern-day Sherlock Holmes framework?
High Potential positive appears to suppose there may be. When Morgan (Olson), a harried however resourceful single mom of three, will get caught messing with a suspect board at her evening job cleansing a Los Angeles police station, she explains to the police that she observed an error that will hang-out her if it went uncorrected. After additional shows of superpowered noticing—at one level, she flags a surveillance video’s date as faked primarily based on wind route and the east-facing orientation of nearly all Catholic church buildings—she explains to supervising investigator Selena (Judy Reyes) that she’s thought-about a “high-potential intellectual.” This designation features a 160 IQ, a hypersensitive eye for element, a photographic reminiscence, and a thoughts too stressed to let issues go.
The cops, clearly unfamiliar with any super-detective present or guide of the previous century, are surprised, and rent her as advisor. Paired with the predictably reluctant Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) and carrying a wide range of loud jackets, Morgan wisecracks and notices her method by means of varied oddball circumstances of the week (whereas an even bigger thriller involving her long-missing ex simmers in the background).
In different phrases, she’s lots like Sherlock Holmes. What separates High Potential from up to date Sherlock riffs like Sherlock or Elementary is, nicely, not a lot, besides that it’s much less intricately plotted than the previous and fewer instantly charming than the latter. The most noticeable departure is Olson’s comparatively cheerful strategy to enjoying a prickly genius. Morgan is assured in her skills, irreverently chatty, and never keen on authority, positive. But for a girl who has to lug a full-sized cart of groceries (plus three children) onto a metropolis bus as a result of her automotive is in the store, she maintains remarkably excessive (and never substance-assisted) spirits. It’s nearly as if the concept that Morgan has gone a long time with out regular employment isn’t plausible!
High Potential doesn’t need to be plausible to be enjoyable. But aside from Olson’s energetic efficiency, the ABC present principally feels prefer it was drawn from the exact center of the pack in the autumn 2011 TV lineup, with flat, interchangeable seasoned-cop dialogue (“In this line of work, you have to hope for the best but prepare for the worst”) and low-style visible drabness dotted with cutesily whimsical cutaways illustrating Morgan’s thought course of.
The greatest shock of the collection is that it was created by Drew Goddard, who wrote some terrific episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, and made the intelligent horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods. This present has not one of the ruefully intelligent format-bending of his most well-known works, and he’s not the one TV all-star on the roster: Rob Thomas of Veronica Mars is credited right here as a producer, although apparently he was changed as showrunner by Todd Harthan (Psych, The Resident). Maybe some earlier incarnation of High Potential maintained a bit extra of Veronica’s noirish leanings or Veronica’s working-class insouciance.
There are nonetheless traces of the latter, handed off as Morgan’s Sherlock-variation hook: Her unpretentious, on-the-ground directness paired with a real blind spot for the niceties of police procedures (slightly than a Sherlockian defiance of them). But is that this actually sufficient to construct a complete collection round when everybody else on the present is so formulaic? The first three episodes get a bit extra comedic as they proceed, and theoretically the present ought to maintain the potential to modulate its tone case by case, like Elementary or, dare to dream, The X-Files. So far, although, High Potential is just mildly diverting—far much less of a unusual outlier in the light-procedural style than its creators may choose to consider.
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