Reality sometimes really is stranger than fiction, as was the case when one television series released an episode about a high-profile art heist involving a Rembrandt a week after a theft at the Louvre captured global attention.
The ABC series, titled High Potential, focuses on Morgan Gillory, a single mom with three kids and a high intellectual potential. Played by Kaitlin Olsen, she helps the Los Angeles police department solve its most difficult crime cases as a cleaning lady turned private consultant.
This year’s midseason finale, titled “The One that Got Away,” finds Morgan and her partner detective Adam Karadec investigating a museum heist involving the $20 million Rembrandt painting Young Girl Leaning on a Windowsill.
During the show’s robbery, a thief repels into the museum on a rope through a skylight, cutting through the glass and disabling security cameras with a laser before setting off a smoke bomb and escaping.
Partnering with the possibly dubious art-recovery specialist Rhys Eastman, Morgan discovers that the stolen canvas was at the center of a fierce ownership battle because it was looted by the Nazis. (The true Rembrandt was never subject to a restitution claim; it has been held by London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery since 1811.)
Though the episode ends on a cliffhanger, Morgan offers some valuable insights into the theft, which she believes was meticulously planned. Since the thief bypassed more valuable artworks to steal this specific painting, she guesses that the theft was carried out for personal reasons, rather than simply for money.
The show also floats the possibility that the fictional theft being could be linked to a string of other high-profile art thefts by an unidentified figure dubbed John Baptist.
The Louvre heist happened well after the episode was written, so the show was likely alluding instead to the famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which saw the theft of 13 artworks in 1990—three of which were Rembrandts. Yet the way the Rembrandt was stolen in the show seems to have eerily anticipated the theft at the Louvre, during which thieves entered through a first-floor gallery window using a cherry picker and an angle grinder to break through the glass.
The High Potential theft and the actual Louvre heist do for now share one other similarity: they both remain unsolved.
