CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews High Potential on Disney +: Crime-fighting Mrs Mop who makes Sherlock look like the class dunce . . .
High Potential (Disney+)
Mental arithmetic is a lost skill.
Chances are, if pocket calculators were around by the time you went to school, you’ve always relied on machines for adding up.
And if you’re from the smartphone generation, doing sums in your head is as redundant as Morse code or shorthand.
The ability to tot up a shopping bill as we trotted the supermarket aisles used to be a source of satisfaction for many — now, it’s freakish.
But single mother Morgan, in the jaunty police serial High Potential, can calculate her weekly spend to the penny, faster than the check-out assistant can scan her purchases, all while carrying on three conversations with her children and solving a crime in her mind’s eye.
Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) makes Sherlock look like the class dunce. She has a photographic memory and an IQ of 160, speed-reads pages of academic text in a blink, can discourse endlessly on medieval influences on modern architecture, and possesses a forensic eye for microscopic detail.
Single mother Morgan (pictured), in the jaunty police serial High Potential, can calculate her weekly spend to the penny, faster than the check-out assistant can scan her purchases, all while carrying on three conversations with her children and solving a crime in her mind’s eye
Morgan, who is played by Kaitlin Olson, makes Sherlock look like the class dunce. She has a photographic memory and an IQ of 160, speed-reads pages of academic text in a blink, can discourse endlessly on medieval influences on modern architecture, and possesses a forensic eye for microscopic detail
She’s also the cleaning lady at a Los Angeles police station.
High Potential is based on a 2021 French-Belgian hit, HPI — Haut Potentiel Intellectuel.
It bears strong parallels with Patience, the Ch4 show that ended last night about a brilliant misfit in a police records archive. That series is also based on a French-Belgian original, 2019’s Astrid Et Raphaelle, which kicks off a new series on More4 tonight.
But where Patience is slow-moving and downbeat, High Potential is more manic than a toddler pumped full of E numbers.
It has the studio-bound look of a classic U.S. sitcom and the pacing to match. Whole scenes are truncated into 30 seconds or less, or simply skipped — one moment Morgan is having a brainwave about her next suspect, the next she’s watching through a one-way mirror as detectives fire questions at the defendant.
The running joke is that Morgan has a dangerous disregard for the law.
Her idea of gathering evidence involves donning her cleaner’s tabard and trundling a mop and bucket past security staff before cracking a safe.
If this were a British show, she’d be played by Sheridan Smith or Kym Marsh. The character needs that touch of chippiness and resentment they could bring, and Kaitlin Olson lacks it.
The wife of Rob McElhenney (her co-star in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), she looks like a rich American pretending to be skint.
But she handles the quickfire dialogue with a comedy pro’s ease. She doesn’t hold back on the schmaltz either — her teenage daughter’s father has vanished without trace, and Olson is great at conveying the confusion, anger and heartache he left behind.
There’s a hint of romantic chemistry between Morgan and her detective partner, Adam (Daniel Sunjata), who spends a lot of time rolling his eyes and growling, ‘Leave this to the professionals’.
Best of all, High Potential flatters us that we, too, could solve murders by spotting the clues missed by police. It can’t be any harder than mental arithmetic, can it?
