ABC’s ‘High Potential’ Replacement Isn’t Officially Renewed for Season 3 Yet
Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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ABC is running a bit light on crime dramas this fall. Its breakout hit, High Potential, was held back for the midseason for the first time for Season 3, putting it on a similar schedule to the network's fellow sleuth, Will Trent, which is heading into Season 4. Meanwhile, Nathan Fillion's The Rookie is also set to pair up with its new Jay Ellis-led spin-off, The Rookie North, on Wednesdays starting in early January. As the cherry on top, the lone crime series remaining wrapped up its sophomore season last month after a shortened seven-episode run that left off with a major cliffhanger and many questions about its future.
R.J. Decker Season 2 wasn't a guarantee to begin with. Despite strong reviews from critics and a solid start on ABC in terms of viewership, the quirky South Florida-set mystery series wasn't quite the runaway success that its Kaitlin Olson-led peer was upon its debut. However, a strong following on streaming ultimately helped save Scott Speedman's titular photojournalist-turned-ex-con-private eye from the bubble for another round to answer the question of who killed Victor Ochoa and to keep solving some bonkers crimes from the Sunshine State. Once more, though, linear ratings left something to be desired at a reported average of around 4.5 million multiplatform viewers in the first seven days, and the shortening of the procedural from an already short nine episodes to just seven, combined with a finale airing before Halloween, seems to indicate the show may be in jeopardy.
Any answers about R.J.'s future aren't likely to come anytime soon. Over two weeks after the Season 2 finale, ABC hasn't handed down a renewal or given any indication that another trip to Florida will be in order. The soonest an answer could realistically come would likely be in January, as the Disney-owned network starts to sort out which series will remain for the next year's schedule. Given that it came down to the wire last time and the low linear viewership again, it's more likely that R.J. Decker will be kept waiting again until around April, before upfronts in May. Series creator Rob Doherty's decision to end on such a critical cliffhanger jeopardizing Mel's (Bevin Bru) family, though, suggests at least some hope that the show will live to fight another day.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Detective Should Solve Your Case? Columbo · Benoit Blanc · Jessica Fletcher · Marlowe
Answer eight quick questions and we will tell you who should be assigned to your murder. Four of the most famous detectives ever put on screen, and four completely different ways of getting somebody to admit what they did.
🕵Columbo(Columbo)
🧣Benoit Blanc(Knives Out)
🖨Jessica Fletcher(Murder, She Wrote)
🚬Philip Marlowe(The Big Sleep)
01
What do people assume about you when they meet you? Pick the one that sounds most like you.
02
Pick a coat. No wrong answers here.
03
How do you get information out of people? One answer only.
04
How would your friends describe you? Be honest.
05
Pick a drink. Pick the closest answer.
06
Where do you do your best thinking? Pick the closest answer.
07
What is your car like? Think about the one on your drive.
08
What makes you good at reading people? Last one. This is the one that decides it.
The Case Is Assigned Your Detective Is…
A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached, which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the case for them being the best in the business.
Columbo
You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man slowly realise he is in trouble.
- You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps working.
- The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered it since.
- Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
- Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.
Benoit Blanc
You are the most interesting person in the room and you know exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise talk to him.
- You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
- Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in 2020.
- Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
- Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point seriously.
Jessica Fletcher
Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.
- You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of information about everybody.
- Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won once.
- The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
- Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.
Philip Marlowe
You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed. Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.
- You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in the morning.
- Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to follow, which matters not at all.
- Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version says something about its decade.
- Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.
Where Could 'R.J. Decker' Go With Season 3?
Should R.J. Decker return, Season 3 will undoubtedly follow up on that final twist that saw Catherine (Adelaide Clemens) and her daughter Sofia (Mélodie Rose Romano) in grave danger when Jessica (Meredith Garretson) puts them in her sights. Once R.J. and Mel exposed her crimes and the possibility that she may have killed her own husband for the insurance money, child protective services came to take her daughter away, spurring her to return the favor to Mel. Coupled with R.J.'s developing romantic life now with two love interests between Emi (Jaina Lee Ortiz) and the newcomer in his world, Trudy (Shantel VanSanten), there's still plenty of ground to explore with the characters beyond the colorful crimes they solve.
Speaking to TV Line, Bru shared that, while she's unaware of any Season 3 developments, she thinks there's a good case to make for Season 3. Beyond being a streaming mainstay, there are few shows quite like it that have a lighter, sillier tone in such a compact package, a fact that makes her hopeful ABC will ultimately keep the crimes coming.
"That's another case for R.J. to crack, the mystery of Season 3. I haven't heard anything, but everyone I've talked to loves the show, even overseas. We're always Top 10 everywhere, here and overseas, every week on Hulu and Disney+. So I believe in my heart that people are enjoying the show. I just think it's a fun, light show. Especially given all the heavy stuff that's always happening in the world, it's nice to have this show that's quirky, it wraps up, we have awesome guest stars, and it's just nice TV. I'm hopeful for Season 3."
R.J. Decker Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu. Stay tuned here at Collider for further updates on the future of the series.
- Release Date
- March 3, 2026
- Network
- ABC
- Directors
- Paul McGuigan, Christine Moore, Holly Dale, Kenneth Biller, Michael Lehmann, Seith Mann
-
Victor Ochoa
-
Enya Flack
Georganna Ballard
-
R.J. Decker
-
Donny Boaz
Preston Howard
- Writers
- Robert Doherty, Jason Tracey, Liz Friedman, Jamie Savarese, Juan Carlos Fernandez, Kenneth Biller
- Creator(s)
- Carl Hiaasen, Rob Doherty
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.