High Potential

The Beautiful Chaos of Knowing Too Much

I’ve spent close to two decades watching Kaitlin Olson play different versions of a glorious disaster. As Sweet Dee on *It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia*, she turned desperate narcissism into an art form, and she brought that same feral spark to *The Mick*. So when I heard she was leading an ABC crime procedural as a quirky LAPD consultant, I winced. It sounded like the kind of safe network paycheck that sands down a great comedic actor.

I was wrong. *High Potential*, created by Drew Goddard and adapted from the French hit *HPI*, is absolutely a network procedural. It’s got the case-of-the-week pacing, the fluorescent precinct sets, the will-they-won’t-they teasing. But Olson doesn’t just fit into the formula—she warps it around herself.



She plays Morgan Gillory, a single mother of three scraping by on a night-shift cleaning job at the police department. She also has an IQ of 160. Her brain runs hot: trivia, patterns, spatial awareness, everything firing at once. The show doesn’t do the chilly Sherlock thing with text floating across the screen. Instead, it visualizes her thoughts with bright pops of color and texture that feel in sync with her aggressively loud wardrobe. The camera doesn’t glide so much as snap—like it’s reacting to the moment a detail clicks into place. It gives the whole series a weirdly buoyant energy for a show that’s still, you know, about murder.

You can see Morgan in full in the pilot. She’s bopping through the precinct with headphones on, all gangly limbs and that slightly unhinged Olson physicality. She knocks over a box of files in front of a murder board, and as she scrambles to gather the photos, you can watch her body change. Her shoulders settle. The frantic buzz drains out. Her eyes sharpen. Then she starts rearranging the board—crossing out the detectives’ suspect, pinning up a new link. It’s a *Good Will Hunting* setup, but Olson doesn’t play it like a victory lap. It’s more like an itch she can’t stop scratching. She can’t leave the puzzle wrong. It nags at her.



That tired edge is the show’s best trick. TV loves to treat intelligence like a superpower, or a license to be unbearable. Morgan can definitely be a lot, but the series mostly frames her “gift” as a headache. She can’t keep a normal job because she corrects her bosses. She pushes people away. CinemaBlend’s Nick Venable was right that it dodges the usual trap of “lead characters whose pompousness matches their intellect.” Morgan isn’t pompous. She’s worn out. She’s clipping coupons to feed her kids while still trying to figure out what happened to her first husband, who disappeared fifteen years ago.

Her weekly counterpart is Detective Adam Karadec, played by Daniel Sunjata. After years of playing various flavors of smooth operator, Sunjata goes rigid and rulebound here, permanently exasperated. It’s a terrific straight-man turn. He carries himself like someone who just wants to finish his paperwork in peace and has instead been tethered to a human tornado. When Morgan launches into some wild tangent—say, 17th-century botany—to explain blood spatter, watch his jaw: a tiny clench, a resigned sigh, and then he follows her anyway.



I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect. Sometimes the dialogue over-explains the punchline, and a few of the precinct side characters still feel like they were pulled straight from a TV-trope catalog. And whether you’re up for a 31-episode commitment across two seasons probably comes down to how much you enjoy the cozy, predictable rhythm of broadcast TV.

Still, I can’t shake what Olson pulls off. In one quiet scene, she tries to tell the precinct captain (Judy Reyes) that seeing everything in high definition isn’t some miracle—it’s isolating. You can actually watch Olson drop the usual layers of comedic armor. It’s raw, and it’s startling coming from an actor we’re used to seeing scream at people in an Irish pub. *High Potential* takes a premise that should feel completely used up and finds an actual heartbeat under the police tape. Turns out Kaitlin Olson doesn’t just know how to wreck a room. She knows how to put it back together, too.