Star Kaitlin Olson and her collaborators discuss making a different sort of cop show – about a quirky LAPD janitor who shows a knack for cleaning up messy cases the police can’t quite crack
Morgan Gillory (played by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Kaitlin Olson) is a night-time custodian at the LAPD — and one fateful evening she accidentally knocks over a murder case file while cleaning (or, more accurately, while dancing and cleaning). With just a quick glance, she determines that the police are botching this one, and does the detectives a solid by pointing them in the right direction — Good Will Hunting-style. When the cops return to work the next morning, Det. Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata, Rescue Me) is furious that someone has tampered with their investigation, but Captain Selena Soto (Judy Reyes, Scrubs) sees the potential in this unconventional “consultant” they never asked for help.
Indeed, Morgan has the potential — she is, clinically speaking, a “High Potential Intellectual,” with an IQ of 160 — to be both helpful and an inconvenience for a by-the-book police department. “The tension comes from Selena investing in what Morgan has to offer. She’s taking a risk and trusting her instinct and knowing that this woman, wherever the hell she comes from and whatever the hell she does, has something to offer,” Reyes explains.
Based on a popular French series, the new comedic drama was developed for American television by Drew Goddard, who worked on Lost, Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before earning an Oscar nomination for writing The Martian in 2015. Although equally familiar with the beats of a procedural and the intricacies of serialized storytelling, for this writer, character is all that matters. “I’m not that interested in plot in a traditional sense. I’m interested in character and soul, so I always start from a place of character. The joy for me is these three characters looking at their lives and dissecting them,” says Goddard. “From the jump, you feel the stress of Morgan’s dilemma, of ‘How do I get my kids to school and solve a murder at the same time?’ That’s the soul of the show.”
To play the struggling single mom with an exceptional mind, Olson feels like she’s had to work harder than in previous roles. “It’s very high-energy, and it’s a lot of very specific dialogue that I cannot improvise my way through. So yes, I’m mentally exhausted — I feel like I put it all out there at the end of the day,” she reflects. “That’s a major difference between Sunny and this show. On Sunny, I just sit in the makeup chair, and I’m like ‘What are we doing today, guys?’ and I open up my [script] sides. Here, I go home at night and I say goodnight to my kids, and then I get ready. It’s a lot of memorizing and figuring out how I want to do stuff.”
What the creative team behind the scenes see as their greatest challenge is making sure that, in inviting a stranger into delicate investigations inside the LAPD, they maintain a level of authenticity. “It’s really unorthodox, but one of the things we absolutely are going to work overtime to protect is this Major Crimes department, because these are really good cops,” says showrunner Todd Harthan. “Morgan’s coming in as this secret weapon to complement that, but we don’t want her to come in and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to wear gloves, and I can touch evidence and taint a crime scene.’ That’s not the story we’re going to tell. Just because she’s a big personality and can come in like a bolt of lightning, it’s their job to wrangle that, and they will.”
The trick to making it all work, according to Harthan, is also finding the balance between the gravity of solving a murder and the series’ sense of humour. “This show has a certain tone that is a wonderful balance of drama and comedy. I’ve tried to embrace a wonderful cast that you can basically write anything to, and find the alchemy between cases that have stakes, and then also the pockets where we can infuse levity in a natural way.”
The crime dramedy will, of course, continue to blend elements of the French original while taking its own, particular creative licence. “As we get deeper in the series, my instinct is it’ll be more original episodes that aren’t borrowing anything from the French series, just because we want to create our own identity,” says Harthan, who nevertheless is a fan of the concept, wherever it stems from. “I think what separates this show from the pack is a couple secret ingredients: I haven’t seen this kind of character take us through an investigative case on TV. And then, the family aspect of this show is on a different level. With the intoxicating relationship of Morgan with her children, you almost forget that those aren’t her real kids. I think that continuing to write that and weave that into the fabric of the show is gonna make it more than just a case-of-the-week procedural. It’s more sophisticated than that.”
High Potential airs Tuesday, October 29, on CTV & ABC