Review: 'High Potential' could be your next 'Castle'-like obsession
It's a TV story as classic as boy meets girl: Mystery-solving genius meets prickly detective in need of investigative help. It's not love at first sight; more like crime-solving at first murder. Sparks fly. Happy endings ensue. The credit roll. That is, until there's another body next week.
You know what kind of TV show I'm talking about here. "Castle." "Bones." "The Mentalist." All cut from the same Sherlock Holmes-inspired cloth, each has an uptight detective matched with an unconventional, dare I say downright irritating civilian with seemingly magical powers of investigation and deduction. We love to watch these prodigies find clues the police miss, all while whipping out a witty retort to every suggestion that they follow procedure and the law.
In that venerable TV tradition, ABC brings us "High Potential" (Tuesdays, 10 EDT/PDT, ★★★ out of four), another cop-and-consultant show that might just be worthy of mention with that list of hits. "Potential," based on a French series, is a bit silly and a bit formulaic, but also lot of fun. It's the kind of sunny detective dramedy we don't see that often anymore in the broadcast sea of overly grim "Chicago" spinoffs and "Law & Orders." Created by "The Good Place" and "The Martian" producer Drew Goddard and starring "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" MVP Kaitlin Olson, "Potential" has the, well, potential to fill a cozy mystery niche that we've all been missing in our deeply serious times.
In the duo of a quirky genius and a straitlaced cop, our smarty pants is Morgan (Olson), a single mom of three with a "high intellectual potential," but enough flightiness and flakiness to mean she's quit or been fired from every job she's ever had. She stumbles into her police consulting gig when she oversteps her real job as a janitor at the station, and is quickly scooped up by commanding officer Selena (Judy Reyes, "Scrubs"). It's very "Good Will Hunting," but with Olson dancing to pop music and wearing leopard prints.
Morgan is paired with Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata, "Rescue Me"), a − you guessed it! − by-the-book, surly cop who has no interest in outside help. That is, until Morgan proves her knowledge of random trivia (like what direction the wind blows in Los Angeles on which days) and powers of observation can help put the bad guys behind bars. He just has to put up with her antics, like taking her baby to crime scenes and borrowing evidence to "work from home."
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
The odd-couple marriage works, of course, and Morgan and Karadec are off to the races with their crime-fighting zeal. Morgan's new career is aided by her ex (Taran Killam) who acts as chief childcare provider for her teen (Amirah Johnson), preteen (Matthew Lamb) and infant.
The episodes quickly fall into an easy pattern, at least in the first three made available for review. Morgan and Karadec swiftly establish a patter together, too, as the actors play off each others' tics nicely. The scripts maintain an easy balance between case-of-the-week mysteries and a larger arc in which Morgan and Selena look into the 15-year-old disappearance of Morgan's boyfriend.
Everything about "Potential" feels easy, in fact. It's not like so many stilted and forced network procedurals that lack charming characters, a sense of whimsy or even compelling murders-of-the-week. "Potential" feels fun because it is fun, taking copious notes from sunny cop shows such as "Monk," "Lucifer" and "Psych." All that murder feels just a little bit less gruesome because everyone's having such a blast hunting the bad guys.
A series as predictable as "Potential" can be comfortingly familiar, or it can feel tired and clichéd. Most of the time, Olson's charisma and Goddard's quick-witted scripts keep "Potential" from feeling too much like a rehash of the shows with which it shares so much DNA. Whether you will welcome another idiosyncratic crime-solving genius into your weekly TV rotation might be based on your own mileage for this subgenre of TV. Is Morgan lovable, or just annoying?
Depending on how you see her, she has the potential to be both.