Kaitlin Olson was hardly an unknown commodity last year, when she was chosen to lead the idiosyncratic ABC procedural High Potential. She’d already galumphed her way through 16 seasons as the ne’er-do-well (and not always so) Sweet Dee on FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and agonized through three years as a Vegas comedian’s neglected daughter on Max’s Hacks, scoring two guest actress Emmy nominations along the way (with a third for short form comedy).
But playing Morgan Gillory, a brilliant, stylish, lolli-popping single mother who sees crime-scene clues her police compatriots often miss, is a whole new ballgame. Literally.
“We were in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, and we were surrounded by thousands of people who were coming up and screaming her name,” recalls Olson’s Always Sunny scene partner and real-life husband, Rob McElhenney. “I could tell, as I was brushed to the side like I was her handler, that people wanted to tell her how much they love the show.”
After 13 episodes of High Potential, Olson has gone from being “that girl who’s so funny on that thing” to a household name juggling three hit shows. Mainstream success was inevitable, her colleagues say, and even critics are rooting for her. A review in The Guardian said High Potential should “bring Olson the kudos she has long been due.”
“When you’ve got a very talented person and you give them an opportunity to reach the largest audience possible, it should work,” says Charlie Day, another Always Sunny costar.
So far, it has worked just fine. More than 12 million people watched High Potential’s penultimate episode on ABC and Hulu, almost 10% more than the season average. And the numbers continue to grow.
Watch the exclusive interview with Kaitlin Olson during the emmy cover shoot.
“Her show has just built and built and built by word of mouth,” says Jean Smart, who plays stand-up comic Deborah Vance, mom to Olson’s D.J., on Hacks. “All of a sudden, she’s got great ratings, and they got picked up for another season. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”
Olson herself says, “It’s such a relief that the vision we all created worked. It’s something that’s for everyone, which is not always what I do. My stuff is not always family-friendly.”
“Not always family-friendly” is an understatement. On Always Sunny, as one of five miscreant operators of an Irish bar in the supposed City of Brotherly Love, her awful antics are infamous. How’s this for a permanent record: Dee was institutionalized for burning her college roommate, molested her buddy Charlie (while insisting women can’t be rapists) and held a funeral for a fake baby she was claiming as a dependent.
Like Seinfeld if Jerry had grown up watching South Park, the long-running sitcom has found the funny in all sorts of cringe, from cancer to cannibalism.
Because Olson finds such edgy comedy so funny, she has always felt she was not destined for network success. When she starred on The Mick, a 2017 Fox sitcom created by Always Sunny alums Dave and John Chernin, the show ended after 37 episodes. In comparison, there are 169 episodes of Always Sunny, and a new season is due this summer on FXX and Hulu.
“Fox wanted to bring a little edge to their comedies,” Olson remembers. “But then there were a lot of notes like, ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ I was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to find a way to say that in a way that I find funny, otherwise you picked the wrong person.’”
The Mick experience made her wary of ever doing a network series again. But Olson found a kindred spirit in Drew Goddard, the creator of High Potential, which is adapted from a French series called Haut Potentiel Intellectuel (HPI). “The truth was we were both very wary of returning to network television,” he says.
“Kaitlin said, ‘Do you think you can protect this show?’” remembers Goddard, an executive producer and writer whose credits include The Good Place and Daredevil. “I said, ‘I don’t know, but I promise you, we will be fighting this fight together. Either we’re going to make it the way we want to make it, or they’re going to fire us, and then we won’t have to worry about it.’”
Obviously, they didn’t get fired. Scoring a strong male lead in Daniel Sunjata (Power Book II: Ghost, Echoes) — “He was born to play this type of do-everything-the-way-it’s-supposedto-be-done guy,” Olson says — and rounding out the cast with such appealing actors as Taran Killam (Single Parents, American Crime Story) and Judy Reyes (Dr. Death, Claws), Goddard and Olson found themselves with a hit.
To read the rest of the story, pick up a copy of emmy magazine here.
This article originally appeared in its entirety in emmy magazine, issue #4, 2025, under the title "Hit List."
