High Potential was one of a number of network procedurals that helped bring back the genre of quirky crime-solvers that used to dominate TV in past decades. Season 2 picks up where the Season 1 finale left off, with a guy dubbed “The Game Maker” driving Morgan Gillory to stick around her home in order to keep her family safe.
Opening Shot: We pan down from a view of a Los Angeles street to see a woman coming out of a club, dancing to Lady Gaga. She’s dressed like Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson).
The Gist: It’s not Morgan, but she does seem like she could be her younger sister. As she approaches her car in a parking lot, she passes a white van, then disappears.
In the meantime, Morgan has been holed up at home with her ex Ludo (Taran Killam), her daughter Ava (Amirah J), their son Elliot (Matthew Lamb) and their baby daughter. They’ve stayed home since The Game Maker (David Giuntoli) dropped a playing card pack with a threatening note in it into her bag. She gets a piece of mail meant for a neighbor’s house, walks to deliver it, and hears “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” there. She definitely thinks it’s the Game Maker taunting her.
She goes back to the LAPD Major Crimes division, where her partner, Det. Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) has been working hard on finding the Game Maker, along with his boss, Lt. Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) and detectives Oz Osman (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne Forrester (Javicia Leslie). Morgan has made myriad connections between that piece of junk mail and the Game Maker, but her colleagues are starting to think that she’s starting to crack from the stress.
Coincidentally, the address of the house Morgan passed is where the missing sister of a woman who is sitting in the detective room lives. The missing woman, Maya Prince (Kate Miner) was the one who disappeared while passing the white van, and when Morgan and Karadec go to the club where she was last seen, her “Morganvision” tells them that she fought back, was knocked out, and dragged to her own car, where she was put in the trunk
The trail leads to Maya’s wealthy boss, Jason Howard (Nick Wechsler), but Morgan keeps seeing the Game Maker. Her theory is that the Game Maker has set all of this up to frame Jason Howard. And while her colleagues are sympathetic, they want to concentrate on finding Maya. In the meantime, Soto gets an address for Ava’s dad Roman (Mekhi Phifer), whom Soto vowed to find in exchange for Morgan joining the squad as a consultant.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Drew Goddard, High Potential is the American version of the French series HIP – High Intellectual Potential. The first season was in the vein of quirky-crime-solver procedurals like Elsbeth and Will Trent.
Our Take: We enjoyed the first season of High Potential because it delivered exactly what we expected it to deliver: Kaitlin Olson being very entertaining as the brainy-but-messy Morgan and a great chemistry between Olson and the rest of the regulars, specifically Reyes and Sunjata. The mysteries Morgan was applying her high intelligence and sponge-like memory to were never what kept us watching, but for shows like this sometimes humor and fun performances are enough, and the first season of High Potential had both in spades.
So it’s always chancy when a series that has a mystery-of-the-week ventures into a continuing storyline that takes up more than just a few scenes in a particular episode, as Goddard and his writers are doing with the Game Maker. The idea that his presence is supposed to create a “big bad” that might shake Morgan’s confidence is a solid one, because it varies things up just enough that the show doesn’t become predictable. But what it also does is take away from what made the show so good in the first season, namely the sense of humor that it displayed as Morgan went about her business.
It turns out that a scared Morgan who is certain of what she is figuring out but no one else is isn’t quite as entertaining. Perhaps, as the Game Maker becomes less of a shadow and more of a physical presence in the lives of Morgan and the rest of the Major Crimes squad, he’ll develop into the Moriarty to Morgan’s Sherlock. What we’d like to see, if the Game Maker is going to be a full-season presence, that he goes away for awhile so that Morgan can get back to just solving crimes and goofing on Karadec, which is what we saw through most of the first season.
Sex and Skin: None, though the costume designers for the show continue to show that Morgan’s bold fashion sense completely works for her and for Olson’s performance.
Parting Shot: The man Morgan thinks is the Game Maker walks into the squad room and states that they’ve been looking to talk to him.
Sleeper Star: Phifer is an interesting addition to the cast as the long-lost Ramon. Steve Howey has also been added to the cast as the precinct’s captain, though he isn’t in the first episode.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re waiting for me to leave so you can poke around Jason’s den without a warrant, aren’t you?” Karadec exasperatedly asks Morgan. He knows her so well at this point.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we still enjoy High Potential, especially now that Olson and the rest of the cast have settled into a nice rhythm with each other, we hope that the continuing Game Maker storyline doesn’t disrupt the show’s flow as much as it does in the first episode of Season 2.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.