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The next ‘Castle’ or ‘Mentalist’?
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The next ‘Castle’ or ‘Mentalist’?

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It’s a classic boy-meets-girl TV story: mystery-solving genius meets prickly detective who needs help investigating. It’s not love at first sight; more like solving crimes with the first murder. Sparks fly. Happy endings follow. Ending credits. Until another body is found next week.

You know what kind of TV show I mean. “Castle.” “Bones.” “The Mentalist.” All cut from the same Sherlock Holmes-inspired cloth, each featuring a stodgy detective paired with an unconventional, dare I say downright annoying, citizen with seemingly magical powers of investigation and deduction. We love watching these wunderkinds find clues that the police miss, all the while wittily retorting to any suggestion that they follow procedure and the law.

In that venerable TV tradition, ABC brings us “High Potential” (Tuesdays, 10 EDT/PDT, ★★★ out of four), another cop show and a consultant who might deserve a mention among that list of hits. Based on a French series, “Potential” is a little silly and a little predictable, but also a lot of fun. It’s the kind of sunny detective dramedy we don’t see too often anymore in the sea of ​​overly grim “Chicago” spinoffs and “Law & Orders.” Created by “The Good Place” and “The Martian” producer Drew Goddard and starring “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” MVP Kaitlin Olson, “Potential” has the, well, potential to fill a cozy mystery niche we’ve all been missing in our deeply serious days.

In the duo of a maverick genius and a prissy cop, our brainiac is Morgan (Olson), a single mother of three with “high intellectual potential” but enough fickleness and unreliability to have gotten her fired from or quit every job she’s ever had. She stumbles upon her real job as a station janitor and is quickly apprehended by Commander Selena (Judy Reyes, “Scrubs”). It’s very “Good Will Hunting,” but with Olson dancing to pop music and wearing leopard prints.

Morgan is paired with Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata, “Rescue Me”), a — you guessed it! — gruff cop who plays it by the book and has no interest in outside help. That is, until Morgan proves that she’s adept at random trivia (like which way the wind blows on which days in Los Angeles) and that her powers of observation can help put the bad guys behind bars. He just has to put up with her antics, like bringing her baby to crime scenes and borrowing evidence to “work from home.”

The odd couple’s marriage works, of course, and Morgan and Karadec go all out with their crime-fighting zeal. Morgan’s new career is aided by her ex (Taran Killam) acting as primary caregiver to her teen (Amirah Johnson), preteen (Matthew Lamb) and baby.

The episodes quickly fall into a simple pattern, at least in the first three that have been made available for review. Morgan and Karadec quickly establish a pattern as well, with the actors playing off each other’s tics nicely. The scripts maintain an easy balance between the mysteries of the case of the week and a larger arc that sees Morgan and Selena investigating the 15-year-old disappearance of Morgan’s boyfriend.

Everything about “Potential” feels easy, actually. It’s not like so many contrived and forced network procedurals that lack charming characters, a sense of whimsy, or even compelling murders-of-the-week. “Potential” feels fun because it is nice, with many notes from sunny police series like “Monk”, “Lucifer” and “Psych”. All that killing feels a little less gruesome because everyone is having so much fun hunting down the bad guys.

A show as predictable as “Potential” can be reassuringly familiar, or it can be tired and clichéd. Most of the time, Olson’s charisma and Goddard’s quick-witted writing keep “Potential” from feeling too much like a rehash of the shows with which it shares so much DNA. Whether you welcome another quirky crime-solving genius into your weekly TV rotation may depend on your own experience with this subgenre of TV. Is Morgan lovable, or just plain annoying?

Depending on how you see her, she has the potential to be both.