Stream it or skip it
Published
Oct. 3, 2023, 4:00 p.m. ET
Some shows are harder to review than others; Usually they are the ones that have a lot of good elements but also a lot of bad elements. So what do you do: do you ditch the show because of the things that stink, or do you adopt a positive attitude and hope things improve? This is the dilemma we faced with a new ABC process.
FOUND: STREAM OR SKIP?
Opening shot: “2003.” A house in the middle of the forest. A young girl is cooking something on a stove.
The essentials: A set of locks on the front door opens and a frightened girl walks in. She says her name is Bella (Jasmine Washington) and she wants to return to her parents. The teenager introduces herself as Gabi (Azaria Carter); She says she will help the girl. When Bella asks if they’re at her house, Gabi replies, “No,” and then when Bella asks how long she’s been there, Gabi replies, “Too long.”
Today, Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) is the owner of a crisis management company in the Washington area whose primary mission is to find people who are missing and have “fallen through the cracks.” These are people who, despite suspicious circumstances surrounding their disappearance, do not attract the attention of law enforcement or the media.
We see what she can do when she gets into a kidnapper’s apartment by posing as a scantily clad woman thrown out of her Uber. Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), the DCPD detective who works with Gabi and her associates, complains that their tactics are borderline illegal, but she doesn’t care because she gets results. Another thing she does is have one of her co-workers, Lacey Quinn (Gabrielle Walsh), stay with the rescued person until they are reunited with their families.
Other employees of her company include Margaret Reed (Kelli Williams), a woman whose son has been missing for 13 years and who is really good at observing human behavior; Dhan Rana (Karan Oberoi), who has his own kidnapping story; and Zeke Wallace (Arlen Escarpeta), an agoraphobic technology expert whose family funded Gabi’s company.
A boy named Deron (Trayce Malachi) shows up at the office of Dani’s company and wants her to find his 14-year-old foster sister. With the police busy finding a senator’s daughter and her foster parents insisting that she’s done this before, Gabi insists on pressing on, knowing that if she doesn’t help the girl, no one will .
But as she does, she still thinks back to the time when she and Bella were held captive by a man they called Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), who forced her to sit at a formal dinner at which Gabi had to talk about the problems of the day. Even though she snapped at him for forcing her, there was still a lot of fear.
Photo: Matt Miller/NBC
What shows will it remind you of? “Found” reminds us a little of other missing person cases such as Without A Trace or Alert: Missing Persons Unit.
Our opinion: “Found” is a procedural that holds our interest more for its backstories than for the actual cases of the week themselves. There’s the big overarching backstory that has such a big twist that we can’t really discuss it here. Suffice it to say, it’s about how Gabi was kidnapped by Sir and how she ended up with him for so long, and then there’s the question of what happened after she and Bella managed to escape his captivity .
This story is intertwined with the premise of the series, and not just because Gabi is driven by her experience as a missing person who fell through the cracks. She has a sense of how kidnappers think, and she could get some help with that.
Hampton is a good lead here, conveying Gabi’s painful story and the strength and determination she needs to face the kidnappers and the DCPD. She seems to have some rapport with Trent, who seems more in tune with Gabi’s point of view than his eye-rolling racist captain (Bill Kelly).
There are clues to the backstories of the other people in Gabi’s company. Lacey’s backstory is deeper than the audience is initially shown, but we also have Margaret’s constant search for her son as well as everything that’s going on with Rana and Zeke. As showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll and her writing team unveil these stories, “Found” has the potential to be a show about a group of diverse characters working to solve these weekly cases.
The first case of the week was fine; We have seen worse and we have seen better. Between Gabi and the crew, there isn’t much mystery to solve, and some of what Gabi gets away with would make anyone paying attention to her throw up their hands in frustration. But if the backstories – especially the biggest one – unfold the way we hope, these cases of the week may not be so important.
Gender and skin: None.
Parting shot: Well, the ending has a huge twist, so we can’t reveal it exactly here.
Sleeperstar: We didn’t think Mark-Paul Gosselaar had what it took to play someone who was almost pure evil, but he pulls off being a scary child abductor pretty well.
Most Pilot-y Lines: “It’s time to sound that amber alarm,” Gabi says after she, Lacey and Margaret see circumstantial evidence at the foster home. As if it were that easy. Luckily, the silliness of this line will actually be fixed later if the DCPD doesn’t issue the warning immediately.
Our call: STREAM IT. If the cases of the week get a little better and the backstories of the regular characters – especially the biggest one – are well-written, Found has the potential to be an above-average network procedural.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting, and technology, but he’s not kidding himself: He’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company, and elsewhere.
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