Kaitlin Olson carries this Los Angeles procedural about a cleaner turned police consultant with more comic timing than the scripts strictly deserve. The cases are forgotten within the hour and the detectives are furniture. We kept watching anyway, and not out of duty.
High Potential, created by Drew Goddard, has one idea and sticks to it: a woman with a genius-level IQ and a mop, cleaning the offices of a police unit at night, sees what a room of detectives has missed. Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson) corrects an evidence board, is hauled in, and is hired by Lieutenant Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) as a consultant. Detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) is told to work with her. That is the whole machine, and it runs one murder an episode, thirteen of them in the first season and eighteen in the second.
It lives on Olson. She plays Morgan fast and loud, in animal print and heels that nobody else in the building would wear, and she has a way of delivering a deduction as if she is slightly embarrassed to have had it. The first time we see her at work she is cleaning with music in her ears, dancing a little, and then she stops in front of the board and starts moving the photographs about without quite deciding to. We laughed out loud, and it was the dancing that did it: she is not showing off, she is bored, and boredom is what a mind like that does to a person. Olson keeps that going for whole episodes. When Morgan reads a stranger from his shoes and his tan line, the joke is never that she is clever but that she cannot stop.
The editing team, Caroline Wang, John Reyes-Nguyen and others across the run, put her thinking on screen as quick inserts: a scuff on a skirting board, a receipt, a ring mark on a table, each held for a fraction of a second before we are back on her face. It is a neat way of showing a mind working and it does the job for the first few episodes. By the sixth it is a tic, and we found ourselves waiting for it the way you wait for a catchphrase. The cinematographers, Mathew Rudenberg and Lisa Wiegand among them, light the squad room bright and clean, more showroom than police station, and Los Angeles outside is all sun and glass. Josh Kramon and Jake Staley’s score bounces along underneath, telling us at every turn that none of this is to be taken hard. It is not, and the music is right about that.
The cases are the weak part, and they are a large part. Morgan does not reason so much as notice, and the show never finds a way to make noticing tense: she looks at a thing, the inserts fire, and she is right. The killer is usually the guest actor with the most lines. Karadec’s dislike of her thaws on a schedule you could set a clock by, and Sunjata, who is good at being put upon, is given little else to do. Daphne (Javicia Leslie) and Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) fill out the unit with jobs rather than characters; they hand over folders and confirm that the thing Morgan said was true. Three episodes in, we could not have told you who killed whom in the first one, and we tried.
What the show has beyond its lead is her kitchen. Morgan’s daughter Ava (Amirah J) is a teenager who has worked out that her mother is unusual and would rather she were not. Elliot (Matthew Lamb) is younger and less bothered. Ludo (Taran Killam), the ex-husband, is amiable and broke and around more than the arrangement strictly requires. Behind all of it is Roman, the first husband who disappeared, whose case Morgan makes the price of her cooperation in the pilot. The scenes at home are written with more care than the murders, and Olson lowers her voice for them. A woman who can read a room in a second and still cannot get three children fed on time is a better subject than any of the corpses.
Against the genre it belongs to, Castle, The Mentalist, Monk, the outsider who sees what the police cannot, it sits comfortably in the middle. It is less inventive than Monk, and about as well made. Most critics have been warmer than we are, and we understand why: Olson is doing something rare, which is being funny in a drama without breaking it. We just wish the drama around her were harder to solve.
It is a 12 certificate and nobody bleeds much. Watch one on a weeknight with something in the oven. You will not remember the case, and you will remember the shoes.
