Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet caught up with HIgh Potential Season 2 on ABC or via Hulu subscription, so be warned!
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It feels like just yesterday when Kaitlin Olson’s Morgan Gillory returned to the 2025 TV schedule to make me (and plenty of LAPD criminals) feel foolish with her photographic memory and all-around brilliance. Yet the midseason finale is already just around the corner, and we’ve yet to follow up on learning what was in Roman’s backpack. Thankfully, Morgan and Ava are back on good terms, even if that doesn’t guarantee the teen will stick to her vows in the future.
I love High Potential’s parent-child relationships for being so realistic and relatable to how my own experiences have gone, both as a child and as a parent, as opposed to the super-heightened or super-passive stereotypes that have plague TV shows for ages. So when co-star Amirah J talked to CinemaBlend ahead of the Season 2 break, I asked how much she enjoyed the on-screen mother-daughter relationship, and she told me that the already experience is made even better by Olson’s attention to details.
She just makes everything so easy on-screen. I mean, she asked for my input a lot with different scenes that we’ll have. She’s like, ‘Would you actually say this? Would a teenage girl actually say this? Can we change it?’ She’s like, ‘What would you say in this situation, or what do you think Ava would say in this situation?’ That kind of thing, and making it as natural as possible so it actually seems like a mother-daughter relationship.
Blessed be Kaitlin Olson for doing something that should have long ago been a norm in an industry where head writers have traditionally been far beyond their teen years. She isn’t the first actor/producer to do this kind of thing, don’t get me wrong, but Ava and Morgan both sound like real people at the same time as sounding like a TV mom and her TV teen. (My own mom never dropped the kind of encyclopedic knowledge that Morgan likely dispenses on a daily basis, so I recognize there are limits to the relatability there.)
Amirah J was all smiles talking about Olson, and when I asked whether her real-life family compared to that of her High Potential character, the actress amusedly pointed to the high-risk situations as a difference, saying:
I don’t know that it compares to my real life, just because I feel like Ava and Morgan have a lot going on in their world that me and my mom don’t have. But Kaitlin off-screen is just incredible, because she is a mother in her real life, and she has two kids, so I feel like that just carries into being on set with her.
As a producer on High Potential, Kaitlin Olson does carry some of the weight of making sure things are going smoothly on the set. This obviously doesn’t incorporate the entirety of that job, but it sounds like she goes the extra mile with her younger co-stars. Amirah J shared an adorable example of it, saying:
Even when we’re not filming, she’s very motherly and nurturing, just asking about what’s going on in my real life. When I was doing prom a few months ago, she was like, ‘Send me all your prom pictures and all your stuff,’ and just, you know, super mom vibes.
I know they’re just actors, and I know it’s just a TV show, but Ava and Morgan looked so happy to hug each other again after talking out their issues. As it should be.
As comforting as it is to know how warm and welcoming things are behind the scenes, fans now get to worry about what’s coming in the midseason finale. My money is on Ava and Morgan surviving it all, since this would be a depressing show otherwise, but I’ve been wrong before….
Find out when High Potential Season 2’s midseason finale hits ABC on Tuesday, October 28, at 10:00 p.m. ET.