Found review: A juicy twist elevates NBC’s new procedural
Shanola Hampton and Mark-Paul Gosselaar are the glue that holds this deliciously unhinged show together
TV Reviews Niki and Gabi
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Found, the latest series from All American showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll that premieres October 3 on NBC, is not your average procedural. Sure, on a purely superficial level, you could argue that the crime drama, one of the only network shows to debut this fall because of the strikes, seems pretty standard: The series follows the lives of public-relations specialist Gabi Mosley (Shanola Hampton) and her crisis-management team who find marginalized people who are routinely overlooked by the authorities and mainstream media due to a lack of interest or resources. (Think Scandal, but for missing people of color.)
Gabi has assembled a group of vigilantes (their words, not ours) who each have a personal experience with the trauma of kidnapping. There’s an attention-oriented law student (Gabrielle Walsh’s Lacey Quinn); an emotionally distant private investigator (Karan Oberoi’s Dhan Rana); a behavioral specialist (Kelli Williams’ Margaret Reed); and an agoraphobic tech whiz (Arlen Escarpeta’s Zeke Wallace), who is using his family’s money to bankroll Gabi’s firm. There’s also Detective Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), who effectively acts as the liaison between the DCPD and Mosley & Associates.
But wait, there’s more: Two decades after she was held captive herself as a 16-year-old, Gabi has now kidnapped her former kidnapper, Hugh Evans, a.k.a. Sir (a terrifying Mark-Paul Gosselaar, in a role unlike anything he has done before) and has been using him to help her crack each case, unbeknownst to her colleagues. That juicy twist helps to elevate Found beyond the standard, case-of-the-week format into a compelling character study of how differently people heal (or don’t) from traumatic, life-changing events—all while shining a light on the real-life efforts of non-profit organizations such as the Black and Missing Foundation. (According to NBC, in any given year, more than 600,000 people are reported missing in the U.S. and more than half of them are people of color.) By any measure, Found runs rings around Alert: Missing Persons Unit, a poorly executed procedural that debuted on FOX earlier this year, and is at its strongest when the actors and writers lean into the show’s inherently soapier tendencies.
In her first major role since wrapping up an 11-season run as Veronica Fisher in the Showtime family dramedy Shameless, Hampton commands the screen as a woman grappling with the unresolved trauma of being abducted for a year and the realization that she, now having flipped the script, may share more similarities with her abductor than she may be willing to admit. Hampton’s Gabi is easily the most interesting character in every scene; her ability to hold a close-up and convey both the urgency with which her team needs to act and the empathy with which she needs to console a distressed family member or friend of the missing—sometimes toggling between both within the same scene—is particularly impressive. Okoro Carroll, no stranger to exploring the heightened inner lives of messy and flawed Black characters, seems interested in pushing back against the trope of the strong Black woman, and Hampton convincingly portrays a protagonist whose intricate web of lies begins to spin out of control.
For a new procedural to cut through the noise in a crowded TV landscape, it needs to have a strong foundation: Each standalone plot has to be satisfying and surprising, while the overarching storyline has to be advanced steadily. The show’s intricately woven flashbacks (with Azaria Carter playing the teenage Gabi) help to contextualize Gabi and Sir’s fascinating dynamic, which pushes both characters into morally grey territory. While it’s obvious that Sir, who insists that he took Gabi from her family to help turn her into the best (or arguably worst) version of herself, has the upper hand in the past, it remains difficult to tell who is in control in the present timeline: Is Sir in charge because he has shaped so many of Gabi’s idiosyncrasies? Or does Gabi, having physically chained Sir up in her basement, have the upper hand? Hampton and Gosselaar remain so evenly matched that your answer may change from week to week, and while their one-on-one scenes may verge on melodrama, they are the glue that holds this deliciously unhinged show together.
Found focuses on cases involving people from underrepresented groups—a young Black girl, an elderly Black man who has another Black male admirer, and a sex worker all make up some of the early victims—and it’s, ultimately, the female characters who do the emotional heavy lifting during most of the cases. Williams, best known for her work on David E. Kelley’s legal drama The Practice, gives a particularly gut-wrenching performance as a mother unable to move on from the disappearance of her son, while Walsh, whose character shares a special bond with Gabi that is revealed at the end of the pilot, adds much-needed levity to an otherwise heavy show.
The women here, over the five episodes screened for review, remain eminently more interesting than the men. While Sir is an aloof and enigmatic presence in Gabi’s past and continues to torment her in the present, the other guys who work with her feel less compelling by comparison, since they only seem to exist thus far to serve Gabi’s crusade. Whatever brief glimpses we get of their lives away from their jobs with Gabi—if we get any at all—still aren’t enough to make us understand what she saw in them initially or why they are worth rooting for. (To be fair, that may simply be an unfortunate consequence of the 42-minute runtime on network TV.) But that’s a pretty minor complaint—and, all in all, the show delivers on its promise, offering a fresh and sudsy take on the archetypes and hallmarks of a well-worn genre.
Found premieres October 3 on NBC
35 Comments
Oooh! Trauma porn!
And the revenge, don’t forget about the revenge!
I hope the series ends with her being dragged away in cuffs, “No, no! See, I was a victim! That makes it OK for me to do to him what he did to me! I’m a victim! Not a hypocrite! I’M A VICTIM…!!!!!!!!”
Seems like an odd duck of a show. On one hand, it’s a network show that airs over linear television (though I assume it’s also streamed somewhere, because *everything* gets streamed somewhere,) which ostensibly means it need to appeal to Boomers. On the other hand, the show’s demographic focus, based on its leads and subject matter, seem to be aimed more at millennials and Gen Z.
Zack Morris is firmly Gen X. But Agents of SHIELD was definitely for Boomers.
Better watch that Trent dude, he looks an awful lot like he might be a double agent for an evil shadowy conspiracy type group…
Lol, pretty much what I was going to say…gurl, don’t trust him.
I’m rewatching it for the first time since it was originally on and I just watched that ep last night. The first season has so much setup for what happens down the line it’s great. Knowing who in SHIELD is Hydra and who isn’t right from the jump is just as fun as watching it week to week waiting to see what happens.
Can’t wait until Sky gets trained up, her and May have some kickass fight scenes down the line.
Free Zack Morris!(Not going to lie, the premise of abduction survivor having abducted her abductor is a few bridges too far. I would think some portion of the trauma comes from what the families of the abductee goes through, which makes it difficult to imagine intentionally subjecting others to the same anguish. It just positions the series protagonist as an anti-hero.)
Now they can have the drama of the main character trying to do good things, but continuously being forced to justify their actions and figure what to do as various characters discover her secret. It sounds a bit like You, except they will try a lot harder to make the woman seem like a justified vigilante.
I’m sure the beardy dude she keeps in her basement doesn’t have any family. He’s a Bad Guy, after all!
Currently predicting a bad guy breaks into Gabi’s house, menace Gabi, and Sir will kill the bad guy.Sir will then explain that he doesn’t allow competitive hunters in his territory.
The series follows the lives of public-relations specialist Gabi Mosley (Shanola Hampton) and her crisis-management team who find marginalized people who are routinely overlooked by the authorities and mainstream media due to a lack of interest or resources. (Think Scandal, but for missing people of color.)I’m sorry, I think you need to run that premise by me another time. They use their public relations and crisis-management abilities to…find missing people? Those are fields that typically overlap? Or they mostly do the missing people investigations but also do PR work to pay the bills?
Abducting abductors is big money these days dontcha know?
The only abductors I care about are in my thighs.
I’m kinda hoping they come across a missing person who’s just so boring and unsexy and unsellable they can’t raise interest in them.“So, what do we know about Clarence?”“Um. He pays his taxes on time. Drives a Kia. He goes to bed every night at 9:30 sharp. One ate a slice of wheat toast in 2008 and described it as ‘Too spicy’.”“Fuck.”
You help find the victims, then do crisis management for the accused so he goes free, so he can get more victims. BOOM, an unending supply of customers!
PR involves getting people to tell you what you want. Crisis-management involves dealing with sudden terrible events.
I guarantee you that Brett Dalton did it, and no matter their best efforts to be rid of him, he will keep on breaking out prison/being reborn as an interdimensional alien/etc. for each new season.
I did not have “Zach Morris becomes Hannibal Lecter” on my Bingo card.
Gosselaar has a great opportunity to pull an Antony Starr and twist his conventional good looks into something grade-A creepy. Villains get to have all the fun anyway.
Conventional good looks?
This is a photo of the actor intentionally bedraggled for a role. This isn’t, like, his natural look. You understand that, right?
Conventional good looks?
dyTQZSc6Jl7Ph1PvCTW7cx4ByIY.jpg (600×900) (tmdb.org)
Obligatory “Zach Morris is Traaassshh” comment.
I’ll be honest, if the show reveals that Gosselaar is playing a grown up Zack Morris who changed his name and went full sociopath, we might have something here.
(a terrifying Mark-Paul Gosselaar, in a role unlike anything he has done before) I beg to differ!
I never realized that was him on Happy Endings. That show was awesome.
a terrifying Mark-Paul Gosselaar, in a role unlike anything he has done beforeHow soon we forget the character of Walker in Punky Brewster.
There’s also Detective Mark Trent (Brett Dalton)Slam Iscariot! strikes again!Everybody who didn’t start to chant “Slab Bulkhead! Fridge Largemeat! Punt Speedchunk! Butch Deadlift!” the moment his name came up? Raise your hand.
Had not heard of this until now. The concept by itself doesn’t interest me but Shanola Hampton and Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Hampton was excellent on Shameless and great at chewing the scenery. People make fun of Gosselaar but he is a good but under-rated actor who consistently chooses interesting and entertaining projects.
Using villainous guy to solve crimes against African Americans…it’s Black Blacklist!
her crisis-management team who find marginalized people who are
routinely overlooked by the authorities and mainstream media due to a
lack of interest or resources. (Think Scandal, but for missing people of color.)If that’s the premise they could have picked a better still than a young white girl and what looks to be an upper-middle class suburban white family.
Oh interesting. I might give it a shot. I wish they made it clearer from the promos because otherwise it doesn’t look like anything anyone would feel the need to watch.
The twist was in the promo, so I was actually hoping for another ‘juicy’ twist.Alas.