At Intolerant TV, we watch every new show on network television for the fall season—so you don’t have to. We don’t watch them for long, though. Instead of giving thumbs up/down or a certain number of stars, we let you know how long we were able to stand the pilot episode before turning it off.
I had high hopes for this show: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Kaitlin Olson starring in a knockoff of Psych. What’s not to love?
Like Sean in Psych, Olson plays someone who has an extremely high IQ, photographic memory and the ability to notice details everyone misses—even trained police detectives. Unfortunately, their respective personalities have kept each of them from reaching their full potential.
For Kaitlin, that means that she’s stuck in a dead-end job, as a custodian at the police station. That puts her in prime position to help the police out with cases. She’ll be paired with a detective who does not respect her unique abilities and has no patience for her hijinks. He’s played by Daniel Sunjata of Rescue Me and The Bronx is Burning.
We’ve got a strong cast, and a premise that’s a proven winner. Psych was a hit and a cult favorite, and even the store-brand versions of Psych (looking at you, The Mentalist and Castle) found large audiences. As long as they didn’t hire complete hacks as writers, it can’t go wrong.
We open with Kaitlin showing up at work. She puts on headphones and does a dance montage while cleaning the office. My heart shatters.
Out of all the different ways to show that she is a renegade, who breaks the rules and does things her own way, you decide to go with a dance montage?
It gets worse. We then learn she’s smart when she is able to calculate percentages in her head while arguing with a grocery store cashier.
Apparently, producers blew the budget hiring name actors and had nothing left over to lure a writing staff. Olson and Sunjata make the pilot work through sheer effort, but you get the sense that, seconds before the director yelled, “Action!” they were looking at the script saying, “So, this is really the dialogue we’re filming? Not a placeholder?”
Surely, Always Sunny and Rescue Me both cut scenes that were orders of magnitude better than what made the air in High Potential.
Too often, both of them appear to be handcuffed by trite, cliched dialogue, and the few times they let Kaitlin cook, it results in frustration at what might have been.
I watched the entire pilot, and I’ll keep going, out of loyalty to the actors involved and the show that inspired this, but it needs an extensive makeover of the writers’ room before it’s too late.
