Excessive Potential is one in all my favourite new exhibits. It presents likeable characters, enjoyable case of the week mysteries and an intriguing long-term whodunit that it chips away at most episodes. It’s all the things you’d hope to see from an oddball detective procedural on the community TV schedule, however that doesn’t imply there’s not additionally an apparent change it ought to make. So, within the spirit of wanting one in all my favourite new exhibits to get higher, to not hate on one thing I don’t like, let’s chit-chat about one factor that drives me loopy with Excessive Potential.
Kaitlin Olson’s consulting detective Morgan Gillory is extraordinarily clever, and he or she’s removed from the one fictional detective written that means. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Patrick Jane from The Mentalist are three fast examples, however anytime you write a genius-level fictional detective, you must resolve how sensible you need to make them. Brilliance is a spectrum, and it’s an energetic alternative writers have to make in deciding the place to position a personality on that spectrum.
Give it some thought such as you’re the writing employees on a present. Let’s say your detective walks into a criminal offense scene and there’s one thing written in Chinese language, you must resolve whether or not your sensible detective has picked up Chinese language alongside the way in which. Let’s say a label is ripped off a shirt, you must resolve whether or not your sensible detective is aware of the place the shirt got here from based mostly on the way it appears to be like. TV detectives are put into some of these conditions each single episode, and it’s as much as these concerned to resolve how a lot they instantly know based mostly on their large brains, how a lot they battle to ultimately get to and the way a lot the facet characters determine and assist them with.
In my view, the stability on Excessive Potential is off. It doesn’t fall into the dumb community TV procedural trope of creating all her supporting detectives incompetent, however for my part, it makes her unrealistically sensible too usually. In a current episode, for example, she fired off the historical past of the sport jacks, all the way down to what it’s known as in numerous components of the world and the way it developed. The present tried to justify it by giving us a backstory of why jacks was uniquely related to her as a child, however she drops any such deep reduce data on all kinds of topics on a really common foundation, to the detriment of the present.
To be clear, I need to see her be freaky clever. I would like her to know issues I don’t know, and I would like her to generally showcase by dropping insane deep reduce details. This can be a present a few girl with a 160 IQ, and I would like her to virtually all the time be the neatest particular person within the room. However she doesn’t have to have an encyclopedic data of almost each topic that comes up. We have to see her not know extra usually, or we have to see her know the gist of one thing after which search for the specifics to get the actually deep reduce info.
Excessive Potential is nice about displaying her struggling at instances. Throughout a current episode, for example, she needed to watch tons of baseball video games to determine why an announcer stated Tiddlywinks. We additionally get a number of photographs of her observing case information and looking for clues. That’s all nice. I’m glad she doesn’t simply resolve all the things instantly, however throughout Season 2, I’d like to see Excessive Potential pull again on her intelligence just a bit bit.
Give her moments of unimaginable brilliance, but in addition, give her moments the place she doesn’t know. Let the facet characters contribute a bit extra. Let her use her cellphone extra usually to confirm info as a result of she solely sorta is aware of the gist. I would like her to be a genius, however I additionally need to really feel like she’s an actual human being and never a tv character who has been written to know each truth on each topic.
Excessive Potential has already been renewed for Season 2. We simply received a finale filled with cliffhangers, and the fanbase is already clamoring for brand spanking new episodes. I am on the sting of my seat too, however when the present returns, I hope it is with a lead character that is rather less clever, which ought to make her extra relatable and provides the facet characters a greater likelihood to shine.