I'm looking for TV shows where the main character is extremely talented, intelligent, or otherwise has some special ability.

Some examples:

House
Sherlock
Suits
Altered Carbon
Lucifer

To be clear, I'm not looking for shows with a protagonist who has a special power but is just one among an ecosystem of other people with similar powers, such as Buffy, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, or the various Marvel TV shows. Nor am I looking for shows where the main character gains some cool abilities but is still outmatched by others, such as Marco Polo.

I'm looking for shows where the main character is uniquely special.

 

Twilight Sparkle in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is very intelligent and has magical powers.

The material can be a bit dense but if you have a high enough IQ to enjoy Rick & Morty you can probably follow along.

 

Did you ever watch Monk? I found the humor tiring every so often, but it's exactly what you're describing.

 

The first thing I though about recommending was Monk.

@Taure, the type of show you're looking for is pretty scarce to be honest.

The closest ones that resemble these type of shows are the typical American procedural shows.

The one I think you would enjoy the most is The Mentalist. The Protagonist is basically a genius at reading people. The character is also pretty charismatic and dynamic. The show also has a neat underline plot line regarding the Serial Killer that killed the Protagonist's family.

If you haven't watched it already, Lie to Me is also pretty good.

 

I haven't seen all of these, so I can't speak to their quality, but I remember some from the commercials:

Kyle XY:

Lie to Me: I love this show, and it is pretty close in tone to House.

Unforgettable

There's also another one, about a drug that makes people ridiculously intelligent but usually kills them. This one random guy accidentally takes one and he's the only person who can do so without dying from it, so he gets recruited by the FBI. I'm trying to track it down right now.
--- Post automerged ---
Ha, found it! Also two others.

Limitless:

Chuck:

John Doe:

 

That's Limitless, a spin-off of the 2011 feature film with Bradley Cooper. Cancelled after one season IIRC. DLP thread: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/limitless-tv-series.30783/

 

IIRC there's a medical drama similar to house but the protagonist has actual savant syndrome. I think it was called The Good Doctor.

I watched the pilot and the second episode, both were mediocre. Some of my friends really enjoyed the show, though. Worth a look, at least.

 

Yep, I found it. I remember liking it, a couple of the gags, but I couldn't remember why I dropped it. I guess instead I just finished it and never got another season.

After rereading the OP, I'm withdrawing Dexter and Malcolm in the Middle from my post. Not what Taure's looking for.

Lie to Me is borderline withdrawal. Cal Lightman isn't necessarily unique in his ability to read the faces of others, but he is very clearly better than his coworkers/employees. There's a reason his work is called the Lightman Group, after all.

I only ever saw one bit of an episode of John Doe. He was surrounding himself with a bunch of radios and televisions set to trivia channels, answering all of them at once. Not to test himself or anything, but to overload his brain so that he couldn't answer them, since the sensation of not knowing something was so unique that he wanted to feel it.

 

It's a foreign show, but the MC in the show "The Bridge" is a canonically autistic woman.

 

In my opinion, this is literally The Best TV show ever made. Forget GoT, forget Breaking Bad, for me this is the pinnacle of TV and it's a crime against humanity that the show wasn't more popular when it was airing.

It has everything, action, comedy, romance, adventure, Family/Friendship, even some hints of tragedy if you squint.

I think the first episode is all on YouTube split up into parts and I would strongly recommend watching to anyone who can breathe.

 

I would recommend 'The Good Doctor'. While the first few episodes are a bit of a drag, once it finds its feet it's pretty great.

 

Numbers, or, Numb3rs.

 

Billions - Genius hedge fund manager vs Genius US attorney
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4270492/

Hannibal - Genius-level psychopath vs literal autistic savant FBI agent - Netflix
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2243973/

Death Note - you already know the plot of this, Yagami Light vs L, genius level of cat and mouse crime/thriller/supernatural - Netflix, Anime
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0877057/

Stranger (Forest of Secret) - Genius prosecutor, crime/mystery, less overt savant than something like Sherlock - Netflix, Kdrama.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6461346/

Money Heist - Not the main character, but one of them is The Professor, mastermind behind the heist - Netflix, Spanish
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6468322/

Doctor John - Very similar to House - Kdrama
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10544464/

Lie to Me - as above, a fun watch with a 'case of the week' style, little overarching plot.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235099/

 

Mentioned already but I recommend Hannibal and Limitless.

 

Scorpion might qualify, but its objectively terrible. That's kinda the problem with what your asking for: there are quite a few of them, at least on American tv, but they mostly range from barely watchable to awful.

Elementary is another example. In my opinion, it's a lot better then Sherlock. Less wildly overblown. Though it does have many of the problems of American serialized tv.

 

Elementary if you haven't seen it.

The shows been on for too long, but the first couple of seasons were great. Mostly because of Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock. He pulls off the tortured genius beautifully. Also unlike "Sherlock " it actually shows you how the mystery is solved instead of everything being done offscreen.

 

While I really enjoyed the show, it has a really disappointing resolution to its main mystery. It's like of all the possibilities they actually hinted, they decided to choose the most boring one with the least charismatic person to play the killer, probably because nobody expected it to be that lacking.

And the series could end really well, if they simply used the season 3 finale as its finale.

I love the first two seasons, but when the show decided to reinvent itself in the third one, it slowly started to lose its magic for me. I never actually got to the fifth season and only checked spoilers for it.

Limitless really changed its tone in later episodes with its pastiche style, but it gained a lot of charm.

 

Yeah, I quite like the concept of

Spoiler

Jayne himself being Red John and it being some kind of Split Personality thing

. Yeah, people would have easily seen it coming but it's a lot better than what we got.

How dare you blaspheme in such a manner?

For real though, I get why some people might not have liked the 2.0 upgrade and the first few episodes of S3 were handled perhaps a bit poorly (The depression stuff could have been done better) but it makes up for it later. I wouldn't really call it reinventing though, more like an evolution. How I heard it explained is that S1 and S2 is Chuck going from a Boy to a Man and S3 is him going from a Man to a Spy and S4 is him just cementing himself as a legend.

Seriously, the show has some of the best character development I've seen in a TV Show. Most shows, as time goes on, characters just become a caricature of themselves but here, each primary and secondary characters are developed really well and there are multiple facets to everyone.

Plus, Season 4 has what I consider is the best episode of the show (Push Mix) and what I would have considered the ideal stopping point for the series. End of S4 minus the last scene also would have been a good stopping point but they kind of shot themselves in the foot with S5. It's not their own fault cause they kept thinking they were on the verge of cancellation and S5 is a good season but it was a bit hard to amtch the high that was S4.

One thing that I forgot to mention is that Chuck has some of the best soundtracks of anything, easily dominating Guardians of the Galaxy.

 

Not sure if I would say it's dominating it, but it definitely rivals it.

 

The Mentalist is a poor mans version of Psych.