Characters of the Week: High Potential, DTF St. Louis & More Bring Emotions and Insight

It was a week where no one got to stay comfortable, and that’s exactly what made it so compelling.

Across the board, our favorite shows pushed their characters to emotional extremes, peeling back layers and forcing them to confront the parts of themselves they’d rather keep buried.

From Law & Order to High Potential, dive into our Characters of the Week.

Det. Vince Riley (Law & Order)

(Virginia Sherwood/NBC)

Vince Riley typically seems so stoic, but on Thursday’s episode of Law & Order Season 25, he broke down, finding his sobriety and life in jeopardy.

Every good cop has made a mistake, and a terrible tragedy happened when Riley and Walker chased a potential assailant. 

Riley followed him in the squad car and became so focused on nailing the perp, who left a body in a suitcase for months, that he ignored the construction signs and missed that a contractor ran into the road.

Riley felt responsible because the man had a family and kids, and that sent him spiraling. He only cared about getting justice. We’ve never seen him in vigilante mode, and he needed to take care of himself and maintain his sobriety.

His marriage was still on shaky ground, and so was his career, when he never showed up to testify.

Drinking makes you do weird things like bare your soul, which is never wise, even if the prosecutor is a friend.

Killing someone, even accidentally, will affect Riley, and returning to AA took courage, since he often thinks he is Superman. It was the first step, and I prefer this human side of him.

Olivia Quinn (Hope Valley: 1874)

(Jeff Weddell/ Hallmark Media)

The more I see of Hope Valley: 1874, the more impressed I am by Olivia Quinn. Roan Curtis has grown up and shines as an elegant, beautiful dreamer.

While Olivia longed to live in the city and looked more comfortable with her sketchbooks than in the trading post, she finally understood the beauty of the town.

The streams, open land, and valleys would appeal to new settlers, but the true beauty of the town lay in the people.

They worked tirelessly to achieve their goals and were passionate about their dreams, and Olivia captured them beautifully in her sketches.

It said something that she didn’t even need some of them to pose, and they were candid, while others, like her mother, Hattie, were forever cemented in her mind.

Art wasn’t typically appreciated in the 1870s, but Olivia has made her mark by providing designs for the boarding house and artwork for the government.

She was creative and fearless before her time.

Floyd Smernitch (DTF St. Louis)

(Tina Rowden/HBO)

If anyone had any doubts about Floyd Smernitch’s character, DTF St. Louis Season 1 Episode 5 wiped them away. Floyd was a good, if troubled, man.

“Amphezyne” was the episode we needed to understand what the hell was going on between the three characters at the center of this story: Floyd, Carol, and Clark. 

And let’s just say that watching Floyd jump out of a closet to help Clark better understand Carol’s sexual desires on his way to save a tuxedo-wearing blind man from walking straight into a swimming pool was just another layer of the man that should have surprised us, but really didn’t.

How many men would derive happiness from seeing their wife and best friend find sexual satisfaction with each other? And how many would interrupt that to go into superhero mode?

(Tina Rowden/HBO)

Ultimately, he just wanted to love and be loved by the two people he cared for most in the world. 

We still don’t know how that will lead to his death or who might have been culpable in it.

But it gives us a better understanding of what drives him and why Clark has been having such a painful time talking about him when he’s no longer around to defend himself.

DTF St. Louis paints a picture in which there are no bad guys, only those who are misunderstood. That makes Floyd’s death a little harder to process.

Nick Wagner (High Potential)

(Courtesy of ABC)

Since his arrival, Nick Wagner has been a complete mystery to viewers and the rest of the team.

But High Potential Season 2 Episode 17 peels back layers on Wagner, and brings him and Morgan closer together, as we slowly realize how, in some ways, they’re more alike than different.

For so long, Wagner appears to be the man who has it all together, but the hour rocked him and exposed him as a man deeply unsettled by his past.

The robbery case leaves him reeling when he pieces together that they’re the same people responsible for killing his fiancée.

It’s something that steadily increases throughout the hour, right up to the moment he pummels and cuffs the killer.

(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)

Throughout, we see this damaged, grieving man longing for justice and needing some lifeline to cling to — and that lifeline is Morgan, the only person he’s seemingly let “in” in quite some time.

We see a version of Wagner who is off his game, fueled by emotion throughout the investigation, with Morgan keeping him steady.

One of his most vulnerable moments is his drunken state as he drowns his sorrows after feeling as if his fiancée’s killers slipped away.

As he recounts what happens, he gives Morgan and us insight into his state of mind and fears, and then nearly succumbs to the unspoken attraction and connection to Morgan.

Something he fully revisits later with that scorching elevator kiss.

Over to you, TV Fanatics. Did these Characters of the Week hit the mark?

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