High Potential and the Return of the Broadcast Procedural

High Potential premiered on ABC on 17 September 2024 with 5.5 million viewers in its Tuesday-night slot and grew across its first six weeks to a Live+7 audience that has touched 15 million when catch-up and delayed-viewing are accounted for. The show is a procedural comedy-drama starring Kaitlin Olson as Morgan Gillory, a single mother working as an office cleaner at the LAPD whose pattern-recognition gift gets her conscripted into the major-crimes unit. Drew Goddard developed the format as an adaptation of the French series Haut Potentiel Intellectuel (TF1, 2021). Olson is an executive producer. The show was renewed for a second season in October 2024, three weeks into its premiere run.

The show’s commercial performance is the first thing to flag because it is the rarest broadcast success of the current cycle. ABC has not had a first-year drama perform at this level since A Million Little Things in 2018, and the specific audience shape (older, broader, tilted female, long-tail on Hulu catch-up) is the kind of demographic ABC has been telling its advertisers it can still deliver. High Potential has delivered it.

The format the show is reviving

The procedural, as a television form, has been slowly unbundled across the streaming era. The shape it held for twenty years (case-of-the-week plus season arc, forty-two-minute runtimes, twenty-two-episode orders, guest-starring stunt casting, broadcast-ready pacing) has been progressively replaced by shorter-order prestige dramas with season-long arcs, cinematic pacing, and no tolerance for the case-of-the-week discipline the old form was built on.

The specific thing the procedural did well, which streaming has mostly lost, is compression. A strong procedural script tells you a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end in forty-two minutes, while simultaneously advancing a set of character arcs that will pay off across the season. The compression is harder than it looks. Most streaming drama, freed from the constraint, has opted for longer-form pacing that is, viewed coldly, less well-engineered.

High Potential remembers how to do it. The pilot runs forty-three minutes, tells a complete case from murder discovery to arrest, introduces five regulars with specific and distinct character work, establishes Morgan’s family situation (three children, varied custody arrangements, a complicated ex who the season will investigate), plants the season-long mystery (Morgan’s first husband disappeared years before and she thinks the police know more than they have told her), and sets up the central working relationship (Morgan and Judd Hirsch’s supervising detective, a specific odd-couple pairing that carries the comic through-line). That is a lot of machinery for forty-three minutes. The pilot runs it cleanly.

Olson as Morgan

Kaitlin Olson has been playing Dee Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for nineteen years. The specific range she has developed inside that show (broad physical comedy, verbal velocity, the ability to make self-delusion land) has been read, over time, as a specific type of comic performance. High Potential asks her to deploy a narrower and more demanding register: a character whose cognition is the dramatic engine, whose patience is the emotional centre, and whose comedy arrives as the relief from rather than the substance of the scene.

Olson can do it. The early episodes show her specifically working against the comic tempo she has been trained in for two decades. Morgan is quick but not fast; the performance slows her down enough to register pattern recognition as an actual cognitive process rather than as stylised cleverness. The comic beats are still there, but they are built around the dramatic core rather than substituting for it.

The specific test of the performance is the family material, which is substantial. Morgan has three children (teenage daughter Ava played by Amirah J, a young son, an even younger daughter with a different father) and the home scenes carry a specific weight the procedural would normally under-serve. Olson plays the mother register with a directness that the Dee Reynolds resume would not predict. The single-mother material is the season’s strongest non-procedural work.

What Goddard is doing with the format

Drew Goddard’s previous work (The Cabin in the Woods, the showrunning on Daredevil, his short-lived Into the Badlands involvement) has not been in the broadcast-procedural register. The specific decision to bring him to this format is worth attention. Goddard is a writer who is careful with genre mechanics, and the procedural is, at its best, a genre-mechanics form. His High Potential pilot deploys the specific structural devices the form requires (cold-open hook, act-break reveal, third-act reversal, tag scene) with a craftsman’s attention that many contemporary broadcast procedurals have let go fuzzy.

The showrunner through the remainder of the season is Todd Harthan, and the writing room has a specific balance of procedural veterans and newer voices that produces a season pattern the current streaming ecosystem rarely attempts. Each episode is its own discrete case, cleanly structured, with a specific central investigation. The season-long Morgan’s-first-husband arc runs underneath, threaded through specific episodes but not overwhelming the weekly cases. The balance is delicate. The show holds it.

The Hirsch and Carlson pairing

Judd Hirsch, as supervising detective Selena Soto’s skeptical colleague, is doing specific work that would be easy to overlook. Hirsch is eighty-nine at the time of production and the show uses his specific gravity (thirty years of Taxi reruns, the Ordinary People Oscar nomination, a career of playing wise older men) as a formal counterweight to Olson’s tempo. The scenes where Hirsch slows a conversation down to let Morgan think are the show’s specific dramatic signature. Television has not had many old-actor-new-actor pairings this effective since The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

Daniel Sunjata, as the detective who partners Morgan most often in the field, is the show’s other specific asset. The Sunjata-Olson pairing has a specific low-wattage chemistry the show has been patient with, refusing to rush it into a romance and refusing to deny that it is there. Broadcast procedurals used to know how to do this. Most of them have forgotten. High Potential remembers.

Where the show falls short

The case-of-the-week writing is variable. The strongest episodes (the third, the sixth, the ninth) are structurally tight and character-productive. The weaker ones (the fourth and seventh in particular) lean on procedural shortcuts the format has been using for decades and could stand to refresh. The network’s demand for a ten-to-thirteen episode season order, rather than the classic twenty-two, is helping the show’s average quality, but the average has not yet caught up to the top quartile.

The season-long mystery arc, which the season has been tracking patiently, pays off in the finale in a way that leaves enough material for the second season without exhausting the premise. The specific reveal (which I will not name) is competent rather than surprising. The show’s commitment to its case-of-the-week form means the arc has been carried in short incremental doses rather than in the extended meditative sequences the streaming-prestige format would deploy. This is the correct choice for the format, but it does mean the arc has not had the specific resonant space the material could have used.

What the commercial success means for broadcast

ABC has been, across 2023 and 2024, quietly rebuilding its scripted slate after the strike disruption. High Potential is the clearest success of that rebuild and the specific evidence the network needed that the procedural form is not dead as a commercial proposition. The demographic skew (older, Hulu-catch-up heavy, long tail) is the specific audience profile broadcast networks are equipped to deliver and streaming has struggled to match outside of specific exceptions.

The show’s Hulu second-window performance is the other piece of the picture. Disney’s decision to cross-promote broadcast scripted onto Hulu the day after broadcast has been running for several years. High Potential is benefiting from the arrangement more visibly than most.

What I am watching for in season two

The first season’s ten-episode order expanded to a thirteen-episode order across the premiere-run renewal. The second season, at the time of writing, is scheduled for autumn 2025 with a fuller episode order. The specific risk is over-extension: the seasonal mystery arc has been well-managed across ten to thirteen episodes; across eighteen to twenty-two, the arc-weight will have to increase or the case-of-the-week engineering will have to stay at a higher average quality than the first season achieved.

The show can do either. It needs to pick one. In the meantime, High Potential is the single strongest broadcast drama of the current year and the case study for what the procedural form still has to offer the audiences streaming has not captured.