French hit detective show comes to US with 'High Potential'

The biggest French television hit of the past 20 years arrives on American screens Tuesday with "High Potential," a family-friendly detective comedy with an ultra-smart twist. Adapted into English from the French series "HPI" and transplanted from Lille to Los Angeles, the ABC series stars Kaitlin Olson ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") as a cleaning woman who is recruited by police due to her brilliant intellect. Showrunner Todd Harthan said Olson's character -- a single mother of three, with an IQ of 160, originally played by French actress Audrey Fleurot -- is one of the show's "secret ingredients" that drew him on board.

"I haven't seen this kind of character take us through an investigative case on TV," he told AFP. "Wildly unorthodox" and "more sophisticated" than a typical police procedural, the show's English-language adaptation has "the potential to reach a huge audience," predicted Harthan, speaking on the sidelines of a press conference this summer. Certainly in France, "HPI" quickly became a phenomenon after its launch in 2021.

Some episodes have drawn as many as 10 million viewers. Ratings on that level have not been seen since 2005, in a different era before television was overtaken and fragmented by streaming platforms. The show's name comes from the term "high intellectual potential," a term widely known in France for children with extraordinary cognitive intelligence.

Olson's Morgan has an encyclopedic knowledge, derived mainly from binge-watching documen.