Kaitlin Olson Has High Potential - And So Does This Series

 

 

If the era of Peak TV has been about dramas with Difficult Men at the center, then the comedies of Peak TV have centered on what could be called ‘Complicated Women’. And most of the best ones have been an interesting measure of comedy and drama that have made critics – and Emmy voters – keep questioning whether the metric for comedy should be the same as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Don’t get me wrong; some of the best network comedies have had the Liz Lemons and Leslie Knopes at their center. But ever since I started savoring the work of all three of the Showtime drama-comedy mixtures such as United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie and The Big C I’ve been in awe of a special brand of very messy – and Emmy winning – actresses who are messed up in very special ways.

During  the 2010s we saw an interesting trend as so many of the great comic actresses began maneuvering into dramas and vice versa. Niecy Nash-Betts, who’d engaged fans with her rollicking work in Reno 9-1-1 earned her first Emmy nominations in Getting On, an underappreciated HBO comedy where she played a nurse working at an elder care facility with some difficult patients and worse staff. From there she became the lead on the brilliant crime drama Claws and has since worked far more in drama than comedy. Rachel Brosnahan had a brilliant guest role in House of Cards and a dark turn in Manhattan before finally finding the role of a lifetime in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Olivia Colman has worked between both genres effortlessly as have Sharon Horgan and Aya Cash. And throughout the end of the decade we saw such pioneering supporting talent as Merritt Weyer and Betty Gilpin play groups of women who were always complicated.

Katlin Olson would seem an unlikely addition to this mix but anyone whose watched her brilliant brand of comedy for the last fifteen years knows its always had a dark edge. It’s always under the surface in the iconic It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In her extraordinary work as DJ on Hacks – which has already earned her two Emmy nominations – being the daughter of a legendary comedienne has brought her numerous addiction, crippling anxiety and mother issues she’s still working through. In High Potential she plays Morgan who as she describes herself in the teaser is “a cleaning lady, a single mom with three kids and an IQ just under 160.”  Ostensibly High Potential is a crime drama but you can see the dark comedy that Olson has been front and center from the moment we meet her.

In the last year we’ve been fortunate enough to see some  extraordinary comic mysteries with amateur female detectives as their leads. In February of 2023 we were blessed with Poker Face where the incredible Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, with a gift for knowing when people are lying and running into murderers no matter where she goes. Last February Carrie Preston recreated her Emmy winning role in Elsbeth where she played the  iconic ditzy attorney we’ve loved across two different Robert and Michelle King dramas, now helping the NYPD solve murders and actually feeling sorry for the criminals she locks up on a weekly basis. Both Preston and Lyonne already had superb chops for mixing comedy and drama (Lyonne on Orange is the New Black and Russian Doll; Preston not only on The Good Wife but on Claws) and High Potential is very much in their bandwidth.

Fans of Criminal Intent will see shades of the detectives that Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeff Goldblum played throughout its run but unlike Goren and Nichols, who just seemed to know everything under the sun with no reason, Morgan actually sees the ‘gift’ she has  as a burden. She can’t turn her brain off and has spent her entire life as just short of the poverty line. When she ‘helps’ the detectives in the opening case – telling them the suspect is a victim – she makes it clear that her brain demands order and doesn’t like messes. As someone who has dealt with this kind of condition much of his life I can’t help but empathize with Morgan a lot.

Morgan is very hyper and clearly has been brought up on cop shows: in the first episode she has to be told that in interrogations you don’t get to yell at a suspect or hit them with a phone book and the constantly put-upon Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) is very annoyed that she just doesn’t understand you can’t take evidence home with you or yell at suspects. It doesn’t help that the other detectives on the squad take a shine to her and the Lieutenant who hired her (Judy Reyes, also good at maneuvering between comedy and drama) is insistent she work with them to “Find the things my detectives miss.”

And Morgan is not a machine in the way that counts because she isn’t a cop. The father of her two youngest children children Ludo (SNL veteran Taran Killam) is still in her life but their relationship is politely strained. The eldest Ava (Amirah J) has constantly feuded with her mother, in part because her siblings clearly have must the same intellectual aspects as her mother and she doesn’t. She’s also still dealing with the fact that her father has been missing her whole life and Morgan has never been able to explain why. One of the reasons she agrees to work with the unit is because she wants to find out what happened to her first husband who disappeared going out for milk and has never come back. The police believe he’s dead; she’s convinced he’s alive. We’re not entirely surprised to learn there’s more to his disappearance then meets the eye but it’s hard to know where this will go.

Morgan also is resentful that for all her gifts she hasn’t been able to get very far in life: this is the first paying job she’s had as well as the first time her brain has actually been good for something. She also has a habit of shooting from the lip and far too often that hurts the people she cares about. And she’s not used to seeing dead bodies the way her detectives are and she takes the losses much harder than the detectives do.

One of the things I like about High Potential is that none of the characters is either stupid or one-dimensional. Karadec clearly has knowledge old cars as well as whiskey and can follow Morgan’s logic when he has too. Daphne and Oz are very good at following up on financials and videos and can keep up with certain parts of Morgan’s theories when they get there. Selena (Reyes) is clearly a capable detective and has a decent back and forth with Lieutenant Melon of robbery-homicide (Garret Dillahunt, another skillful genre mixer) who while single minded is very good at his job. The series has a breezy back and forth, going between darkness and light in a way that I’m more than used to and happy with so many good ABC procedurals, be they The Rookie or Will Trent.

I’m not shocked that the early reviews for High Potential have been generally positive and the ratings rather superb. Indeed, I’m actually beginning to think that network television is moving in an interesting direction as we reach the mid-point of the 2020s. Yes we do have our fair share of procedurals, among them the soon to return Tracker and The Irrational but we also have some fascinating more interesting darker shows such as Found and Accused which are breaking ground in a ways I honestly didn’t expect TV, much less network, to be capable of. (Many of them will be reviewed in the days and weeks to come.) Television is moving into an interesting phase in its development and High Potential shows that networks, if they try, can keep up with cable and streaming. I hope this show continues to find its audience so we can enjoy this intellectual dynamic for years to come.

My score: 4.25 stars.