The Most Polite Young Man In Prime Time

Freddie Highmore apologizes even when he doesn’t need to. His network bosses must be thrilled.

- Carl Swanson

FREDDIE HIGHMORE, slight, pale, well-mannered, and low-key English, is, at 26, so earnest that he seems to be from another, less desperately self-branded time. I meet him at the Essex House hotel on May 15, the morning of the ABC “upfronts” at Lincoln Center, where the network showcases its programming to advertisers and the press. This year’s festivities focus, imprudently in retrospect, on Roseanne Barr and the network’s “heartland strategy.” That strategy includes Highmore’s feel-good show, The Good Doctor, which premiered last fall to ratings nearly as high as Roseanne’s. We sit in the window, and he orders a decaf and apologizes, first, for being in sweatpants and, later, for being the British star of a hit American TV show—“You thought you’d gotten rid of us and then, like, here we come again. Sorry.”

Two weeks later, on May 29, Barr would upend ABC’s agenda by comparing former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett to an ape on Twitter, prompting the network to cancel her show and, with it, an estimated $60 million in ad revenue for next season, and in the process making its former No. 2 show its new No. 1. In other words, it’s now up to Highmore and The Good Doctor to come to the rescue—stat.