Found review: A juicy twist elevates NBC's new procedural

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.