High Potential is one of my favorite new shows. It offers likeable characters, fun case of the week mysteries and an intriguing long-term whodunit that it chips away at most episodes. It’s everything you’d hope to see from an oddball detective procedural on the network TV schedule, but that doesn’t mean there’s not also an obvious change it should make. So, in the spirit of wanting one of my favorite new shows to get better, not to hate on something I don’t like, let’s chit-chat about one thing that drives me crazy with High Potential.
Kaitlin Olson’s consulting detective Morgan Gillory is extremely intelligent, and she’s far from the only fictional detective written that way. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Patrick Jane from The Mentalist are three quick examples, but anytime you write a genius-level fictional detective, you have to decide how smart you want to make them. Brilliance is a spectrum, and it’s an active choice writers need to make in deciding where to place a character on that spectrum.
Think about it like you’re the writing staff on a show. Let’s say your detective walks into a crime scene and there’s something written in Chinese, you have to decide whether your brilliant detective has picked up Chinese along the way. Let’s say a label is ripped off a shirt, you have to decide whether your brilliant detective knows where the shirt came from based on how it looks. TV detectives are put into these types of situations every single episode, and it’s up to those involved to decide how much they immediately know based on their big brains, how much they struggle to eventually get to and how much the side characters figure out and help them with.
In my opinion, the balance on High Potential is off. It doesn’t fall into the dumb network TV procedural trope of making all her supporting detectives incompetent, but in my opinion, it makes her unrealistically smart too often. In a recent episode, as an example, she fired off the history of the game jacks, down to what it’s called in different parts of the world and how it evolved. The show tried to justify it by giving us a backstory of why jacks was uniquely relevant to her as a kid, but she drops this type of deep cut knowledge on a wide variety of subjects on a very regular basis, to the detriment of the show.
To be clear, I want to see her be freaky intelligent. I want her to know things I don’t know, and I want her to sometimes show off by dropping insane deep cut facts. This is a show about a woman with a 160 IQ, and I want her to almost always be the smartest person in the room. But she doesn’t need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every subject that comes up. We need to see her not know more often, or we need to see her know the gist of something and then look up the specifics to get the really deep cut information.
High Potential is good about showing her struggling at times. During a recent episode, as an example, she had to watch tons of baseball games to figure out why an announcer said Tiddlywinks. We also get a lot of shots of her staring at case files and trying to find clues. That’s all great. I’m glad she doesn’t just solve everything immediately, but during Season 2, I’d love to see High Potential pull back on her intelligence just a little bit.
Give her moments of incredible brilliance, but also, give her moments where she doesn’t know. Let the side characters contribute a bit more. Let her use her phone more often to verify information because she only sorta knows the gist. I want her to be a genius, but I also want to feel like she’s a real human being and not a television character who has been written to know every fact on every subject.
High Potential has already been renewed for Season 2. We just got a finale full of cliffhangers, and the fanbase is already clamoring for new episodes. I'm on the edge of my seat too, but when the show returns, I hope it's with a lead character that's a little less intelligent, which should make her more relatable and give the side characters a better chance to shine.
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