This fall, ABC premieres High potentiala police comedy starring Kaitlin Olson. She plays a mother whose personal life is in disarray, but she has an IQ of 160 and a keen observant eye that helps the police solve murder cases. The French series that High potential It’s based on the fact that it was just added to Hulu.
HIP – HIGH INTELLECTUAL POTENTIAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening shot: A woman turns off the lights in her house and goes out, dressed in a short skirt and heels, as if she were going to a nightclub.
The essence: In reality, Morgane Alvaro (Audrey Fleurot) is on her way to work cleaning the police headquarters at night. While cleaning and listening to music on her headphones, she throws away the files of an ongoing case: a man was killed with a shotgun and his wife, a lawyer, is missing. Morgane looks through the file and the photos, walks over to the whiteboard with information about the case, crosses out “suspect” under the lawyer’s photo and writes “victim.”
As Detective Adam Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) briefs his boss, Céline Hazan (Marie Denarnaud), on the progress of the investigation, he notices what Morgane wrote. After viewing the security footage, she is brought in for questioning and reveals details in the photos that the police overlooked that indicate the lawyer was kidnapped.
Before she is brought in, however, we see Morgane shopping with her three children. She is able to calculate the bill in her head, so she knows that her eldest daughter, Théa (Cypriane Gardin), has put something in the cart. She is raising the children alone, having had them with several different men.
When they find the security footage from the crime scene, Morgane notices that the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for the date marked. All of these observations lead Hazan to ask Morgane how she knows all of this. Apparently, Morgane has an IQ of 160, which gets her labeled as “HIP” or “high intellectual potential” at school. But she’s never found that being so smart has helped her in life, especially not in relationships, and she has a bit of a problem with authority.
Case in point: she gets into a fight with the police at the station and overhears them calling her a “whore”; in exchange for not pressing charges, Hazan tells Morgane that he will help Karadec with the investigation. Of course, Karadec is not too happy about this, and even less so when Morgane obtains a letter from the lawyer’s office without going through the proper procedures first. But she changes her mind when her instincts start to prove her right.
What shows will it remind you of? HIP – High Intellectual Potentialwhich debuted in France in 2021, falls into the great television tradition of underrated civilian investigators helping the police solve murders. It’s the same tradition that gave us A murder has been written and Elsbeth;. HIP – High intellectual potential It is also the basis for ABC’s new fall series. High potentialstarring Kaitlin Olson.
Our opinion: There is nothing particularly revolutionary in HIP – High Intellectual PotentialIn this case, the unexpected twist is that the underrated civilian helping the police is a genius who seems to have never found a use for his intelligence. In other words, his life would be the same disaster no matter what his IQ was.
In reality, though, Morgane’s abilities aren’t so much about being super-smart and able to absorb a lot of information; they’re about how she processes information and sees things differently than most. It’s sort of what Sherlock Holmes did 170 years ago, which is combine observations about a scene with his knowledge of human behavior to come up with theories that “normal” cops couldn’t. If anything, Morgane’s ability to make observations that others don’t is more a case of neuropergence working in tandem with her intelligence. But the show isn’t looking to make such a nuanced characterization.
Morgane has a backstory, as we learn at the end of the episode: Théa’s father disappeared right when she was born and was never found. Morgane’s joining the police as a consultant is contingent on helping her find him. That’s a more recent “grand tradition” on weekly case mystery shows, where there has to be a continuing backstory bubbling away in the background. As we saw with Elsbeth This past season, that backstory isn’t always necessary and sometimes takes away from the enjoyment of a show. The jury is still out on whether HIP‘s continuing story is either going to help the show or hurt it.
We enjoyed Fleurot’s performance as Morgane, which is key to the success of a series like this; the cases aren’t going to be as memorable as the character solving them, and Morgane is a pretty special character. Hopefully, the detectives she helps will be less like the stereotype of the headstrong cop wedded to procedure that we see on most of these shows, but that might be too much to ask of this show.
Sex and skin: None.
Parting shot: Hazan agrees to find Théa’s father so that Morgane can start working with the police as a consultant.
Sleeping Star: Théa, played by Cypriane Gardin, won’t be your typical moody TV teenager, which is always refreshing to see.
Pilot’s most typical phrase: Some of Morgane’s observations, such as the lack of a bow on the curtains, seem so obvious that one wonders if she is working for the worst police detectives in France.
Our calling: STREAM IT. As always, programs like HIP – High Intellectual Potential It depends on how enjoyable it is to see the civilian helping the police solve crimes. And in this case, Audrey Fleurot’s enthusiastic performance as Morgane Alvaro is heartening.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting, and technology, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV addict. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.
