Summary
High Potential’s near-perfect pilot episode is everything you need to introduce a new procedural. This has all the makings of a major hit for ABC and Hulu.
ABC’s High Potential has a cracking elevator pitch – what if Good Will Hunting, but the janitor ends up being a police officer instead of a mathematician? There’s a bit more to it, admittedly, but Episode 1 opens with Morgan Gillory cleaning the Los Angeles Police Department and making an amendment to an ongoing crime board that later turns out to be correct, much to the shock of the seasoned detectives in the office. So, the similarities are there.
Morgan is a bit more stable than Will Hunting. She’s a single mother to three children – Ava, Elliot, and baby Chloe – but she’s working as a cleaner to try and support them. She has a “thing”, though – she’s what’s known as a high-potential individual, someone with an IQ of 160, a tendency to notice minute details and fix mistakes, and cognitive abilities that border on the superhuman.
Case Notes
The LAPD isn’t thrilled about Morgan messing up the board until this emerges and Lieutenant Selena realizes what they’re dealing with. Changing the border to reclassify the case’s apparent perpetrator, Lynette Acosta, as a potential victim, isn’t even the half of it. Before long, Morgan has deduced that there was a third person in the room when Lynette’s husband, Anthony, was killed.
And so it goes. Episode 1 of High Potential is all about establishing a couple of things. One is Morgan’s particular set of skills. Another is why the LAPD would have need of them and be willing to tolerate Morgan’s unprofessional eccentricities to get them, and a third is why Morgan needs the work so badly. Nothing’s complicated here – Morgan’s broke, she’s brilliant, and her approach gets results that the police can’t afford to ignore – but it proceeds with tremendous personality and energy.
This, I think, is the show’s secret. The details of the case end up being fairly knotty, but you don’t strictly need to follow them. What’s important is that you follow Morgan’s train of thought. Her conclusions are quite reliably grounded in logic. She isn’t magically pulling information out of thin air; she’s paying attention and making smart deductions. She’s good at reading people and she’s willing to put herself on the line in a way that the cops aren’t. That impulsiveness is what makes her charming and relatable.
A Question of Character
High Potential only works because of Morgan, who is striking a very delicate balance between being someone you root for and someone who is altogether too much. Thus far, Kaitlin Olson is nailing it, though it remains to be seen whether later episodes can sustain the characterization.
But Morgan isn’t the only character. Despite her obvious crime-solving brilliance she has to be schooled in police etiquette by Detective Karadec, who becomes a reluctant partner and/or babysitter, depending on the occasion. Speaking of babysitters, Morgan has an actual one in the form of her ex and Elliot and Chloe’s father, Ludo, who is great with the kids but couldn’t cope – it’s implied – with Morgan’s eccentricities. She’s not shy about sharing how her brain, impressive though it might be, isn’t exactly accommodating of a humdrum life and ordinary relationships.
The Wider Story
High Potential is a procedural, and Episode 1 even has one of those obligatory scenes towards the end where Morgan lays out her theory about what happened and is proved to be correct at every turn. But it’s also clearly going to have an overarching mystery. At the end of the pilot, Selena offers Morgan a job consulting for the LAPD, and she takes it on the condition that Selena uses the police’s resources to help her find Ava’s father, who disappeared when Ava was a baby. The assumption is that he just walked out on them, but Morgan isn’t buying that. Based on how smart and self-aware she is, Selena isn’t either.
This is, really, everything you need from a premiere in a show of this type – a fairly novel take on the crime genre, a solid cast, a playful sense of humor, and a snappy pace. It’s early days yet, but this could easily prove to be one of the breakout hits of the year for ABC and Hulu.
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