Kaitlin Olson Outshines Formulaic Comedy

So you mean to tell me there’s a procedural series starring Kaitlin Olson called High Potential that’s not about her solving crimes while high?!

It’s not that Olson is synonymous with stoner culture so much as known—beloved, even—for characters who blunder through unusual situations with underachieving yet winning gusto. She performs, most notably on the sitcoms It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Hacks, with a comic fearlessness that would be wasted on a more stock character. Surely, then, there must be some twist to her network crime-solver beyond plugging her into the modern-day Sherlock Holmes framework?

High Potential sure seems to think there is. When Morgan (Olson), a harried but resourceful single mother of three, gets caught messing with a suspect board at her night job cleaning a Los Angeles police station, she explains to the police that she noticed an error that would haunt her if it went uncorrected. After further displays of superpowered noticing—at one point, she flags a surveillance video’s date as faked based on wind direction and the east-facing orientation of virtually all Catholic churches—she explains to supervising investigator Selena (Judy Reyes) that she’s considered a “high-potential intellectual.” This designation includes a 160 IQ, a hypersensitive eye for detail, a photographic memory, and a mind too restless to let things go.

The cops, obviously unfamiliar with any super-detective show or book of the past century, are stunned, and hire her as consultant. Paired with the predictably reluctant Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) and wearing a variety of loud jackets, Morgan wisecracks and notices her way through various oddball cases of the week (while a bigger mystery involving her long-missing ex simmers in the background).

In other words, she’s a lot like Sherlock Holmes. What separates High Potential from contemporary Sherlock riffs like Sherlock or Elementary is, well, not much, except that it’s less intricately plotted than the former and less immediately charming than the latter. The most noticeable departure is Olson’s relatively cheerful approach to playing a prickly genius. Morgan is confident in her abilities, irreverently chatty, and not fond of authority, sure. But for a woman who has to lug a full-sized cart of groceries (plus three kids) onto a city bus because her car is in the shop, she maintains remarkably high (and not substance-assisted) spirits. It’s almost as if the idea that Morgan has gone decades without steady employment isn’t believable!

High Potential doesn’t have to be believable to be fun. But apart from Olson’s energetic performance, the ABC show mostly feels like it was drawn from the precise middle of the pack in the fall 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 visual drabness dotted with cutesily whimsical cutaways illustrating Morgan’s thought process.

The biggest surprise of the series is that it was created by Drew Goddard, who wrote some terrific episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, and made the clever horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods. This show has none of the ruefully clever format-bending of his most famous works, and he’s not the only TV all-star on the roster: Rob Thomas of Veronica Mars is credited here as a producer, though apparently he was replaced as showrunner by Todd Harthan (Psych, The Resident). Maybe some earlier incarnation of High Potential maintained a little more of Veronica’s noirish leanings or Veronica’s working-class insouciance.

There are still traces of the latter, passed off as Morgan’s Sherlock-variation hook: Her unpretentious, on-the-ground directness paired with a genuine blind spot for the niceties of police procedures (rather than a Sherlockian defiance of them). But is this really enough to build a whole series around when everyone else on the show is so formulaic? The first three episodes get a bit more comedic as they proceed, and theoretically the show should hold the potential to modulate its tone case by case, like Elementary or, dare to dream, The X-Files. So far, though, High Potential is only mildly diverting—far less of a quirky outlier in the light-procedural genre than its creators might prefer to believe.