High Potential is coming back for a third season — but has lost another showrunner as the series looks for a replacement.
News broke on Thursday, March 5, that Todd Harthan has exited the show to focus on the upcoming live-action adaptation of Christopher Paolini’s YA book series The Inheritance Cycle. The adaptation — titled Eragon — is cocreated with Paolini and Harthan will serve as coshowrunner alongside Todd Helbing.
High Potential, which premiered in September 2024, was created by Drew Goddard. The pilot was written by Goddard, who was expected to executive produce alongside Sarah Esberg, Rob Thomas, Dan Etheridge, Pierre Laugier, Anthony Lancret, Jean Nainchrik and Alethea Jones.
Thomas, meanwhile, was expected to serve as the showrunner before exiting in June 2024 — months before the series premiere. Harthan was ultimately announced as the new showrunner who also served as an executive producer.
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The police procedural follows a high-potential intellectual — Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) — who teams up with the LAPD to help solve murders. She gets paired up with Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), who is initially skeptical about Morgan’s involvement with the Major Crimes unit but ultimately starts to rely on her.
Season 2 picked up with the confirmation that Morgan’s ex Roman was still alive after going missing for more than a decade. The only information Morgan — and all of Us — have is that her ex worked as an FBI informant and doesn’t trust the LAPD.
“It’s a pretty bumpy ride. We’re going to start unpacking some pretty intense things with Morgan, as it relates to all things Roman. There are all kinds of trials and tribulations that are going to happen with the kids at home,” Harthan teased exclusively to Us Weekly in January. “It’s just going to get messy and complicated — hopefully in all the best ways so that the audience stays on the edge of their seats.”
He concluded: “Our job now as we get to the back half of the second season is to fill in some of the big blanks and progress some of the relationships. You’re going to see some intense things happen between Steve Howey’s character and Captain Wagner really starts to bloom in the back half. That causes some good soapy messes on multiple fronts. It’s just our normal MO of just trying to mix things up and keep the audience engaged and keep them guessing.”
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At the time, Harthan also expressed excitement at more guest stars.
“One of the wonderful things about this particular season is now that the show is doing really well, the choices we’ve had for casting have been incredible,” he shared. “In the back half, you’re going to see some really exciting guest stars.”
Harthan continued: “We have this wonderful main cast and we’re trying to recruit — just like with Steve Howey. These actors have been just incredible. They can come into our show and hang with our wonderful cast and just add their own flavor to our world. It’s been exciting and you’ll see there’s some really cool people popping in.”
High Potential airs on ABC Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET. The show is streaming on Hulu.
