Elsbeth vs High Potential: both earned a season 3 — only one kept the person running the show
CBS and ABC both found a hit in an odd woman who's smarter than the cops around her. Both shows made it to season 3. Only one of them made it there with the same person in charge.
Elsbeth and High Potential are network TV's two favorite brainy outsiders. Carrie Preston plays Elsbeth Tascioni, the cheerfully strange lawyer from The Good Wife, now helping the NYPD. Kaitlin Olson plays Morgan Gillory, a single mom and cleaner with an IQ of 160 who ends up consulting for the LAPD.
Both shows earned third seasons. Behind the scenes, though, their paths split, and one of them heads into season 3 with a new team at the wheel.
Elsbeth: steady hands
Elsbeth premiered on CBS in February 2024, created by Robert and Michelle King, who also created The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Jonathan Tolins, a longtime King collaborator, was tapped as showrunner, per Paramount+.
Tolins ran season 3, which aired in two parts across the 2025-26 season, and he's still running the show now. CBS renewed it for a fourth season in January 2026, and season 4 premiered on October 8 with 20 episodes, Thursdays at 9 p.m. The cast has shifted a little: Carra Patterson's Kaya Blanke moved from series regular to guest star in season 3, and Christine Ebersole joins season 4 as Elsbeth's mother. The person shaping every case hasn't changed.
High Potential: a new team for season 3
High Potential, adapted from the French series HPI, became a phenomenon fast. Season 2 was the first show in a 10 p.m. slot to reach No. 1 in the fall since ER in 1999, according to ABC research cited by Looper, and the 2025-26 season ended with it as the No. 1 show among adults 18 to 49.
Then the showrunner left. Todd Harthan, who ran both seasons, announced in March 2026 that he was departing to co-run Disney+'s live-action Eragon with Todd Helbing, per AOL. In May, sisters Nora and Lilla Zuckerman were named co-showrunners for season 3, Yahoo reported.
The Zuckermans aren't strangers to the genre. They were showrunners on Peacock's Poker Face, and before that they wrote for Suits, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Prodigal Son and Fringe.
The Columbo connection
Here's the fun twist. Elsbeth is built on the Columbo format: each episode shows you the killer up front, and the fun is watching Elsbeth figure it out. Poker Face, the Zuckermans' last show, was Rian Johnson's Columbo homage. So High Potential just hired its new bosses from the other side of the same family tree.
The show that kept its showrunner is the Columbo-style one. The show that lost its showrunner replaced him with people who just ran a Columbo-style show.
High Potential gets the biggest stage a network can give: an episode right after Super Bowl LXI on February 14, 2027, with season 3 rolling out on Tuesdays from there, per TheWrap. Elsbeth already has four seasons with the same person in charge. Morgan Gillory's next case starts with the biggest audience of the year and a brand-new pair of bosses.
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