This is the fourth post of the Finding Humour in the Environmental History of the Climate Crisis series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.

High Potential (ABC, 2024-2025) is seriously funny. In the American crime dramedy, based on an original French/Belgian series HPI (Itinéraire Productions and Septembre Productions, 2021), Morgan Gillory, the titular “high potential” intellectual played by Kaitlin Olson (from Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a star-confirming turn), helps the Los Angeles Police Department to solve a series of puzzling murders in a glittering, contemporary cityscape. Olson’s Morgan is objectively a delight from the start: caught on a security camera interfering with a crime notice board, dancing on tables, and stealing a lollipop in her erstwhile job as cleaner at the police station. Forced to explain herself to sceptical detective Adam Karadec (played by Daniel Sunjata), Morgan ends up helping solve the crime. She is eventually taken on as a consultant because of her incredible skills of perception and wells of abstruse knowledge absorbed from daytime television, insomniac internet searching, and pop cultural savvy. The TV show sings in the weird chemistry between colourful Morgan and strait-laced Karadec, in the increasingly inventive yoking of Morgan’s oddball perspective on the world to solve the crime, and its sentimental investments in kindness and collaboration.

But is High Potential seriously funny about the climate crisis? At first glance, the series, set in a glitzy, idyllic-looking Los Angeles, seems far away from the wild fires that were devastating the real city in 2025. Even Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism, which deliberately seeks out humorous approaches to the environmental crisis away from canonical ecocritical texts like Byron’s “Darkness”(1816) or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), sticks to edgy, or in her terms “trashy,” texts like Wild Boyz (Dickhouse Productions, 2003-2006) and not an episodic crime show like High Potential. However, several episodes early in the series explicitly focus on environmental themes. Episode 4, “Survival Mode,’’ begins with the assumption that an environmentally conscious father has kidnapped his estranged daughters to prepare for a coming apocalypse. The following episode, “Croaked,” sees a veterinarian killed by their own pet poisonous frog. And episode 6, “Hangover,” investigates the death of a CEO of a medical start-up whose anti-anxiety drugs cause respiratory illness in its child patients. These episodes highlight that the climate crisis can be the context for a seemingly unrelated medium: a cosy crime drama. 

“Survival Mode,” for example, starts out by suggesting that two little girls (played by Pippa Blaylock and Charlotte Ann Tucker) have been abducted by their environmentally conscious father, Wendell, in order to to live survivalist-style out in the desert. The mother (Madeline Zima) and her parents (Christopher Cousins and Amy Davidson) paint the father as a radical, an extremist with an environmentalism that is dangerously out of touch with reality. They ultimately treat him with suspicion because of his extreme response to climate change. Over the course of the episode, Morgan and Karadec’s perspectives on the parents’ and grandparents’ positions towards the climate crisis undergo a series of shifts. Wendell had been protesting his father-in-law’s breaches of environmental laws, and he can’t be the kidnapper because he is buried underneath his survivalist store of vegetables (which Morgan perceives due to inconsistencies in soil coverage); the dead dad’s survivalist teachings warp from extreme to sensible, indeed, life-saving pedagogy for his daughters when they run away from the real kidnapper and seek out high ground in which to hide. “Survival Mode” starts out sceptical of radical responses to climate change but then pacily and wittily shows that audience how such a radical response might just save them and their children. Long before Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism, Joseph W Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival (1977) argued that the comic offered us an analogy for the functioning of evolution to find a way to acclimatize to climate change and accommodate to a changing world. Even if High Potential doesn’t sell itself as an example of climate change fiction, its comic approach to solving crimes offers us ways of thinking about surviving the climate crisis.

I won’t spoil the other two episodes, but I will suggest that environmental factors are consistently emphasised as part of the method Morgan uses to crack each case, with Morgan sympathising with characters who stand up for environmental protections or who have become victims of ecocidal activities themselves. Climate crisis forms a backdrop to the show, explicitly registered in these episodes, but functioning subtextually in the show’s persistent interest in parental responsibility to children, the ethical use of authority, and the necessity for close attention to our surroundings not only to solve crimes but as a way of life.

Morgan agreed to work as a consultant for the police only if the department head, Lieutenant Soto (Judy Reyes) reciprocate by re-opening the cold case into the disappearance of Morgan’s husband just after her first child was born (and subsidising Morgan’s consultancy by paying the father of her two younger children for day care). Parental absence and responsibility are thereby baked into the show’s structure. Over the course of the series characters form a search for Morgan’s missing husband, an absent father figure, and think constantly about parental responsibility to children. Absent fathers act as a repeated metaphorical prompt in High Potential for children and young people, represented by the feisty Morgan, to take responsibility for creating a better future themselves. 

Morgan’s condition, as a “high potential” intellectual, is represented as both a blessing and a curse in the series. It is obviously a blessing as it enables her to solve each case every week. It is a curse because the way her mind works, absorbing vast amounts of information and fixating on small details until she can understand the whole pattern of a situation, disrupts her ability to make lasting relationships and to hold down permanent job positions, which was why she was working as a cleaner in the police department in the first place. It also functions as a model for behavioural change for the viewer. Each episode includes at least one montage representing how Morgan’s mind works, a quick succession of images flicking through paperwork, photographs, and details from the murder scene, which often hone in on environmental factors: strange abrasions on the body, unexpected items found at the scene, tiny details missed by professional police officers. High Potential celebrates Morgan’s extreme focus on these details as non-normative and transformational. Beyond the context of the crime drama, Morgan’s way of seeing is held up as a model for an alternative way of being in the world. Much of the humour of the series resides in the clash between Morgan’s unconventional perceptiveness–also coded into her colourful sartorial style–and Karadec’s more common sense view of the world. Morgan pokes fun at her police partner’s stuffiness. Morgan’s sense of humour works as another model of resistance to traditional and somber authority, offering her ““high potential” perceptiveness and hilarity as an alternative form of authority in relation to the world. This dichotomy of creativity and pragmatism drives the problem-solving aspect of the series. 

High Potential is a delight to watch–lightweight, colourful, escapist–but it also works as a way of responding to the climate crisis through humour, celebrating alternative perspectives and alternative forms of authority as ways of both seeing and making the world anew. As Morgan explains to her young son, distressed at the sight of his dad who has collapsed under the strain of caring for three children while Morgan was at work, “do we want to be scared, or do we want to notice all the wonderful things that are happening right around us?” High Potential is funny, seriously, and takes seriously the potential to change the world by taking careful notice of its wonders.

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Andrew McInnes

Dr Andrew McInnes is Reader in Romanticisms and Co-Director of EHU Nineteen, the nineteenth-century research centre at Edge Hill University. He has published widely on Romantic period women’s writing, gothic fiction, and children’s literature. He watched High Potential every Thursday morning when a new episode was released. This blogpost is him pretending it was “for research”.

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