“I caught the bug and sort of fell in love with it the second I started writing,” Todd Harthan recalls of his unexpected journey into screenwriting. The showrunner of ABC’s High Potential starring Kaitlin Olson wasn’t always destined for Hollywood. In fact, his career began on a completely different track – business school at Fordham University in New York.

Surrounded by creative roommates, including his best friend James Roday Rodriguez (Psych), Harthan found himself questioning his future in corporate America. “I don’t think I want to wear a suit and tie and be talking about like stocks and bonds,” he remembers thinking. “What am I doing? I want to do something else.”

With a passion for horror films and armed with only a video camera, Harthan and friends began writing and shooting their own movies. The experience was transformative, leading to a life-changing decision. “I’m gonna call my parents and tell them, I don’t think I’m going to stick with this whole business school thing. I think I’m going to move to LA and give this writing thing a shot.”

Business Meets Creativity

Interestingly, Harthan’s business background didn’t go to waste. “A good chunk of my time now that I run shows is looking at the money that we have and trying to stretch the dollar, bang for the buck, put it on the screen.” This practical approach to production shapes his creative decisions. 

One of the things that we always do in the writers’ room is when we build an episode… some of my favorite scenes are the quieter, more tense sequences where you don’t have a lot of people, you don’t have explosions and things, but it’s atmosphere and great direction and good performances.

For aspiring screenwriters working on independent films or trying to manage budgets, Harthan offers pragmatic advice, “I think it’s just coming at it always from the character perspective, as opposed to the spectacle.” He adds, “One of the exercises I always do is I look at these scripts before we film them and go, what’s the first thing I cut?”

Todd Harthan

This ruthless efficiency wasn’t always his approach. “When I first got in, I was definitely the guy that you’d walk in the room – and I had an overstuffed episode. It was like every ingredient you could possibly throw in the soup.” 

The consequences were clear. “Now I get into the editing room and I go, I have a director’s cut and it’s 15 minutes over – It’s not good for morale. You have actors shooting scenes that aren’t going to live because you didn’t need them in the first place.”

The Collaborative Process

Managing a television series is about more than just writing scripts. “Micromanaging is not your friend,” Harthan emphasizes. “When you’re in such a collaborative business and you’re building a team of writers, I think it’s invaluable to lean on the talented and smart people that you’ve surrounded yourself with.”

This trust becomes particularly important with the demanding production schedule of television. “On The Resident, in a 22 episode season, that’s the equivalent of 11 movies worth of material,” he points out. The shift to shorter seasons for High Potential (14 episodes) has allowed for more focus on quality. “I do think that there is a quality over quantity thing that happens in television. And it just becomes more manageable.”

When reflecting on his body of work, including TV shows like Psych, Rosewood, and 9-1-1: Lone Star, Harthan identifies a clear pattern.

I love to mix tone. I don’t love to write straight drama. I don’t mind writing straight comedy, but I love seamlessly blending both.

This approach carries over to High Potential, which he compares tonally to Erin Brockovich. 

The key, he explains, is “not making Morgan into a caricature.” Despite her “loud sartorial style” and big personality, grounding the character in reality is essential. “If we ground her and make her feel real and relatable, then that sort of dictates everything around it.” The result is a show with remarkable tonal flexibility. “Life is absurd and hilarious and heartbreaking and everything in between. And I think that’s the tone of the show. It can hit all those notes… every episode has kind of its own DNA.”

Creating a procedural show centered around a genius character presents unique challenges. “This is way up there. Probably the trickiest show I’ve ever done,” Harthan admits. “The puzzles have to be smart and clever, and you have to earn the twists and turns.”

Rather than relying on technology or forensics, High Potential leans into the unique abilities of its protagonist. “She sees like a guy standing against a wall and knows based on how many cinder blocks are behind him, she can guess his height,” he explains. “It’s more of, ‘Oh, this isn’t giving us anything but]Morgan sees the thing that advances the story or gives us the break.'”

Finding these clever solutions requires extensive research and creative problem-solving. “We pull from lots of different things, whether it’s historical references or her vast knowledge based on life experiences or the books she’s read.”

Casting Kaitlin Olson As Morgan

For Olson, best known for her role as Dee on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, High Potential offered a dramatically different opportunity. “I think Kaitlin likes a challenge and she is a perfectionist in a good way. And she has tremendous range,” Harthan notes. “Morgan cannot be more different than Dee,” he jokes. “There’s just nothing she doesn’t, isn’t willing to try or places she isn’t willing to go. So you can write her anything and you’re in pretty good shape.”

For writers hoping to break into the industry, Harthan looks for one key quality in spec scripts: a distinctive voice “that doesn’t feel pedestrian or disappear into the crowd.

He cautions against trying to write what you think others want to see. “I made this mistake when I was coming up, I was like, ‘Well, I think this is what’s going to get me hired.’ And I go, ‘Well, it should be more like, this is what I’m passionate about.'”

Some of the most impressive samples he’s received were “super weird and like way out there, but so well executed and just showed me like a beautiful brain that I wanted to be around.” His parting advice encapsulates his journey from business student to successful showrunner. “It sounds ridiculous, but you got to write what you’re passionate about. If you write what you think people want… they were always my weakest samples.”

This interview has been condensed. Listen to the audio version here.