Kaitlin Olson is cursed with High Potential

[_{With Sunday’s 76th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards signalling the start of another Fall TV season, we’re going to up the review ante here at brioux.tv. Maurice Tougas leads things off with this look at one of the new traditional broadcast network shows about to come our way.]}

In High Potential, a new ABC series airing on CTV, Kaitlin Olson – the perpetually put upon ‘Sweet Dee’ Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – plays Morgan, a single mother (of course) of three. As the show begins, she is a cleaning lady, the most attractive, most stylishly dressed cleaning lady in all of Los Angeles. While sucking on a lollipop (how cute!) and listening to music while cleaning police headquarters, she accidentally knocks over a pile of evidence photos. Within minutes of scanning the photos, she changes the status of one of the people on the evidence board from ‘suspect’ to ‘victim’.

I think you know where this is going.

Morgan, as it turns out, has an IQ of 160 and “advanced cognitive abilities”, which gives her a “compulsion to put things right”. Her mind spins wildly out of control, which results in her inability to hold a job. Of course. What company would want someone with advanced cognitive abilities?

Morgan makes Sherlock Holmes look like Inspector Clousseau. At one point, she instantly detects that a doorbell camera video of a suspect was doctored because of the direction of the wind in the video. How did she know which direction the wind was blowing? Well, there was a church in the video, and she knows churches are built facing east. I’ll just have to take her word on this. 

While Morgan, who is a prickly sort, is a kind of super genius who will certainly solve a case a week in 44 minutes, she can’t solve one mystery – what happened to her husband, who disappeared 15 years ago? Ah, the required continuing story line.

In the pilot, Morgan solves the crime of the week, or at least I assume she did. To be honest, I zoned out in the last 10 minutes. High Potential doesn’t allow the viewer to solve the mystery, because the clues that only Morgan can see are only revealed in the final 10 minutes, and by then I had lost interest.

I like Kaitlin Olson on Sunny, which is in production for its 17th (!) season. I hope she doesn’t leave that delightfully foul comedy, because her new series only has high potential for viewers with low expectations.

High Potential premieres Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 10 pm ET/PT on ABC and CTV.