(courtesy IMP Awards)
TV should be, in a perfect world, one of those leisure pursuit that doesn’t demand a lot of you.
It is, after all, something that you do to escape the pressures of everyday living; but in recent years, with the rise of a wealth of brilliantly produced streaming shows, it’s also become something that challenges and intensely involves you which is, of course, its own very special and rewarding kind of narrative pleasure.
But sometimes you arrive home, or switch off from working at home, exhausted to the core of your being, and all you want is to just park your mind in neutral and enjoy great characters doing entertaining, undemanding things (and this is in reference to scripted shows, not reality TV which is default escapist pretty much 100% of the time).
When those moments arrive, and at this point in corporate time when more and more is being by less and less people that’s more often than not, then you need a show like High Potential.
A police procedural with a twist, High Potential may be escapist fare but it’s smartly written escapist fare and that is why, while it doesn’t exactly reinvent the genre it occupies, it’s a huge amount of fun to watch.
It helps that it has a hell of premise on which to rest its case-of-the-week storylines.
Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) is a whip-smart mother of three whose IQ of 160 means that her mind rarely rests, and that, combined with a prodigious bank of knowledge and intuitive insight, leaves her unable to sleep well, hold down a steady job or keep a relationship.
Quite why that kind of intelligence inspires so much collateral damage is not made clear, and honestly, is one of the logicalities in the show that doesn’t quite add up – High Potential is full of these moments but you go along with them because suspending belief is half the fun of shows like this – but what Morgan’s just-getting-by show as a cleaner at the police station allows is for her to come into contact with an evidence board, put together to try and solve a murder.
Caught up in her music soundtracked cleaning, Morgan knocks over the board in the pilot and as she frantically tries to tidy it all up, she works out that the music being fingered as the main suspect is, in fact, the victim and that the police have got it all wrong.
Now, as this point, you have to leave aside that a newbie would see things so obvious that a skilled and experience police team – Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), his partner Daphne (Javicia Leslie), Major Crimes investigator Lev “Oz” Ozdil (Deniz Akdeniz), and their boss Selena (Judy Reyes) – haven’t seen because the entire show rests on the fact that Morgan can see stuff that no one else can.
Stretching the bounds of credibility to a twang-inducing degree? Of course, but half the fun of shows like High Potential is that go off on merry flights of fancy in real-world settings, injecting a certain amount of pleasing wish fulfilment in places where what you want and what you get aren’t always the same thing.
Law enforcement, no matter how well its prosecuted, is never easy, clean or neatly tied up with a bow, and if that was what we saw on a show like High Potential then we’d all likely turn off pretty quickly.
After all, reality slaps us in the face with the imperfect nature of life everyday so why on earth would you willing expose yourself to more of that morale-sapping real life stuff on your down time?
The beauty of a show like High Potential is that it gives viewers the neatly solved cases, the sense of justice being served, the fairytale of a single mother finally getting a break and getting ahead and of a mum getting on with her kids, and allows to stop worrying, for 45 or so delicious minutes as the completely sh*t state of the world.
What makes this particular slice of escapist TV work so good to watch is how well written it is, and how Olson takes her clever, sparkly dialogue and brings alive her character as someone who is able to get away with saying all kinds of things just because she’s smart.
She’s not crass or rude, and in fact, gets along with everybody she works with, even Karadec who embraces her by the end of the first episode as someone he can work with, and her smartness makes her likeable because she mixes it in with a whole of empathy and a buoyantly vivacious personality.
You want to spend time with Morgan, you want her to do well, and you want the cases, which are reasonably bog standard basic stories of murder and kidnapping etc, to be solved and for the world to be better even if it’s just on tele.
The fact that it’s done by someone you enjoy the company of so much is the icing on the narrative, network TV-cake, and it means that High Potential, based on a French-Belgian show called HPI (Haut potentiel intellectuel), gets away with being so much more than just a straightforward police procedural.
Many of its components are not that out of the box, and were it not for the vivacity of the writing and Olson’s gift for vulnerable, comedic sparkliness, High Potential would be just another run-of-the-mill cop show.
That it isn’t comes down to the decision by producers to make this escapist slice of legal and life wish fulfilment a cut above the average so we can divert ourselves from the sh*ttiness of life but with characters, dialogue and a sense of fun along for the ride and a pleasing sense that what we lose in our day-to-day lives in terms of fairness, justice and warmth of connectivity is made up for by shows like High Potential which is everything you could want in a piece of intelligent and empathetic escapist TV.
Originally broadcast on the US ABC network, High Potential is currently streaming on Disney+