‘High Potential’ Review: Kaitlin Olson Is the One Good Reason to Watch ABC’s Clumsy Procedural

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Note to writers: If your main character feels the need to announce their IQ wholly unprompted, I’m going to require at least 30 minutes before I’m prepared to take them seriously again as a likable human. If you’re prepared to take that risk, have at it, but otherwise it’s perhaps advisable to have your character simply prove their intelligence.

Maybe one-third of the way into the pilot for ABC ‘s new procedural dramedy High Potential , there’s a discharge of exposition as egregious as any I’ve ever seen. Not only does Kaitlin Olson ‘s Morgan volunteer her IQ to a ranking LAPD officer — 160, if you care about such things, which you really shouldn’t — but the conversation continues.

“The technical term is high-potential intellectual,” Morgan says of her own virtuosity. “Means you have advanced cognitive abilities. Intellectual creativity, photographic memory. Stuff like that.”

Sounds great, right? WRONG-O!

“No, not a gift,” 160-IQ Morgan says. “I obsess over every little problem I see. My mind is constantly spinning out of control, which makes it impossible to hold a job, relationship, a conversation. Not a gift.”

It’s a bad scene, but it’s brief and it does, if nothing else, lay out the premise of High Potential , which shouldn’t be as difficult this series is making it look. Viewers are familiar already with Good Will Hunting (or Abbott Elementary ) and thus the not-so-shocking notion that somebody could both be super intelligent AND work on a custodial crew. Viewers are even more familiar with the idea that police departments often employ civilian consultants to lend their expertise to floundering detectives.

Yet, though the three episodes sent to critics, High Potential is still struggling to figure out the most basic parts of what should honestly be the clearest of concepts. It’s an arduous process that I’m willing to tolerate for a bit longer for exactly one reason: Kaitlin Olson.

As stated above, Olson plays Morgan, single mother to pouting teen Ava (Amirah J), ultra-nerdy Elliot (Matthew Lamb) and baby Chloe (some babies). Morgan arrives at the LAPD early in the mornings, when the offices are completely empty — crime, in the city of Los Angeles, apparently sleeps — plugs in her headphones and dances around cleaning. One day, mid-boogie, she knocks over a case box, stares at the clues and then makes a key change to a crime board charting some mystery with a murder and a missing woman.

Detective Adam Karadec ( Daniel Sunjata ) is not happy that somebody is messing with his crime board and he orders the security feed scoured to determine the culprit — because, again, there are hours when the LAPD offices are just closed and nobody has a clue who might be around. Morgan is summoned and booked for tampering with evidence until she does one of those fun, “Let me explain everything in the most contemptuous way possible!” parlor tricks that forces nearly everybody to realize that she has a brilliant mind. No. Wait. That’s the title of a different broadcast procedural premiering this month.

Anyway, that’s around when Morgan gives her credentials, by which I mean “her IQ.” She adds that she watches a lot of TV documentaries, which is how she knows the history of European church construction, naming conventions in Madagascar, the burn rate of candles and literally anything else that might be needed to solve a case as part of the LAPD’s Major Crimes unit, which in early installments seems to be tasked with some fairly mid-level crimes if you ask me.

Karadec remains skeptical, but he and Morgan banter in that way that detectives and civilian contractors always banter. Karadec’s boss, Selena ( Judy Reyes ), is just grateful to have somebody who can boost the department’s clearance rate, while their other colleagues — Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne (Javicia Leslie) — welcome her with underwritten openness.

High Potential was created by Drew Goddard and adapted from a French format, which is confusing because “genius single mom police consultant” feels like the sort of premise you could just call “original” without much risk, but what do I know? If there are distinguishing elements to the French formula, they’re floating loosely through this American counterpart, which looks and feels like a work in flux. Goddard immediately passed the show along to original showrunner Rob Thomas and half of the creative team from iZombie (another “civilian consultant” dramedy), who then quickly passed the show along to new showrunner Todd Harthan. His credits include Rosewood , in which the civilian consultant was a private pathologist.

This is a lot of creative people — a lot of TALENTED creative people — to not be able to solve one big riddle: How much does Morgan’s “high potential” actually allow her to know?

If Morgan knew a lot about one topic, you’d need other characters, even if she tried to steer investigations toward that one thing she knows. If she knew a little bit about everything, you’d at least need somebody back in the office on a computer to Google the lofty concepts she knows but can’t fully explain. As it stands, she knows everything about everything, which makes everybody else superfluous.

So what narrative purpose do you make everybody else serve? Well, Selena is the understanding boss, with the always tremendous Garret Dillahunt joining the cast in the second episode as an additional, more incredulous, authority figure. Oz and Daphne, both currently between specialties, are there to smile appreciatively.

And Karadec? He’s stuck being stern, disapproving and perpetually wrong, except for when it comes to issues of extremely basic police procedure. See, Morgan watches between 10 and 12 hours of television and YouTube per night, but she doesn’t watch true crime documentaries or Dick Wolf dramas (I’m assuming, though this is a problem that could have been clarified by one line of dialogue). Karadec’s primary purpose is thus to spell out stuff like “evidentiary chain of custody” and “gloves” to Morgan. So Morgan makes all of the other detectives look stupid and Karadec is there to make the LAPD look ethically rigorous. Which is, if we’re being completely honest, more hilarious than any piece of dialogue thus far.

The process of figuring out what Morgan knows and when she knows it is probably the biggest concern in the first three episodes — definitely bigger than the cases of the week, which are completely disposable. So far, High Potential is doing a better job of visualizing Morgan’s various waves of inspiration with cheeky cutaways and the like, several of which actually made me laugh out loud. More of that and more offbeat Los Angeles locations, please. Steer into what makes your series distinctive!

For now, the distinctiveness is largley limited to Olson. It took the industry a little while to realize how frequently even Olson’s wildest comedic work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was rooted in dramatic plausibility (see “Hundred Dollar Baby” and “Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare”) but The Mick and her Emmy nominated Hacks work have proven her versatility. This is hardly a “serious” performance — the costumes and dusting-while-dancing would jeopardize that hope — but Olson is strong enough to ground even the ludicrous beats and silly enough to make it clear that High Potential recognizes the absurdity of some of those moments.

On the domestic side of the story, she’s got believably sweet moments with Lamb and Amirah J and even the babies, though the show has yet to take advantage of Taran Killam as her slacker ex, whose character is best defined as “Named Ludo.” Olson and Sunjata are still figuring out their chemistry — in the pilot, he seems like he’s reading cue cards off-screen, but he’s getting better — though thankfully there have been no indications that we’re supposed to be rooting for a future romance there.

With the ability to go to whichever tonal extreme the narrative finally lands on — the problem with situating Morgan on a Major Crimes squad is that she may be a character more suited to solving, well, Frivolous Crimes — Olson represents this series’ high potential. Everything else needs to catch up with her.

(Concluding note: Unless your main character is a bouncer for a Mensa-affiliated strip club, there’s no reason for ANYBODY to ever say their IQ in your movie or TV show. But I would absolutely watch your show about the bouncer for a Mensa-affiliated strip club.)