ICYMI: NBC’s Found Will Be Your Next Broadcast Obsession

Editor’s Note: Welcome to ICYMI! With so much TV constantly premiering, we’re still highlighting some of the best shows you may have missed in the deluge of content from throughout the year. Join the Paste writers as we celebrate our underrated faves, the blink-and-you-missed-it series, and the perfect binges you need to make sure you see.

NBC’s Found is a procedural unlike any other to grace your television screen. Set in the D.C. area, Gabi Mosley (Shanola Hampton) and her team at Mosley and Associates—Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh), Margaret (Kelli Williams), Dhan (Karan Oberoi), and Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta)—use their very special skills and unfortunately traumatic histories to help them find missing people, with each episode delivering a new case filled with twists and turns as they desperately try to bring someone home. For many reasons (including this absolutely stellar cast), Found is a shining light in the current television landscape that you need to add to your watchlist.

First and foremost, the excellence of the cast cannot be understated. While the stories each week about the new person (or persons) the team is trying to find are powerful, the most incredible part of the show—which separates it from any other procedural, really—is that the members of Gabi’s team, including Gabi herself, all have personal experience with abduction. At some point throughout their lives, Gabi, Lacey, Dhan, and Zeke were all taken, facing similar but incredibly different circumstances that, ultimately, led them to where they are today. 

Each is trying to heal from what happened to them in their own ways—Lacey has learned self-defense as she is still filled with fear, Dhan leans toward violence displaying impulse control issues, while Zeke struggles with agoraphobia and helps the team using his technological skills from his apartment. Meanwhile, Gabi, as the star of the show, is the Queen of unhealthy coping mechanisms. 

Margaret, on the other hand, faced the other side of this horrible occurrence: her son, Jamie, was kidnapped more than a decade before the events of the pilot episode. Like the others, this dramatically changed the course of her life, but in a completely different way. Margaret is an interesting counterpart to the others as she searches for answers about what happened to her son, all while using the skills she gained seeking such answers—like reading body language and paying attention to the most minute details—to help their current investigations. (For those in the know, Margaret is very similar to Williams’ character on the short-lived FOX crime drama Lie to Me, which only boosts her performance.) However, we also see how her son’s disappearance impacted her relationships with her family; namely, her other children. 

As they help find others using their wide variety of skills, they are each helping themselves and each other, too. They have formed a family at Mosley & Associates, relying on each other and the satisfaction of bringing others home (particularly those that society isn’t interested in searching for) to heal. The series acknowledges and highlights that they aren’t the healthiest bunch of people as it digs into their trauma, especially Gabi’s trauma as the series is filled with flashbacks to her time while abducted by the nefarious Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), in a way where most other television shows fall flat.

What makes the series so interesting is the character development. Where most procedural mysteries too often come at the expense of the characters, Found does a deep dive into the characters to explore who they are and where they’ve been to elevate its case-of-the-week antics. This is especially true with Gabi and Margaret (and maybe Lacey) in the first season, which consists of only thirteen episodes. There’s a balance here that many shows could stand to learn from; as much as we love a good procedural, it’s the characters and their journeys that keep us coming back whether the cases are interesting or not.

That said, the investigations conducted on Found have been fairly interesting and put the characters in intriguing situations. This is particularly true for Gabi, as she is the head of the agency and the one appearing on the news to ask for help and call out the public’s lack of interest and/or the police’s lack of effort—sometimes much to the chagrin of her hunky love interest Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), who is actually quite lovable (for a cop, on a show where the cops aren’t necessarily always the good guys). Plus, these are unlike cases that have been showcased on television en masse in the past, which is actually quite exciting to watch.

In addition to this, there’s a twist in the pilot episode, which I won’t spoil, that completely changes everything that you think Found is supposed to be in the best way. It raises the stakes and shifts the story completely moving forward, and is so good that you don’t want to be spoiled before you have an opportunity to see it for yourself. Nonetheless, the series delivers some pretty good twists in general, all the way through the very end of the first season’s finale. All in all, this is a must-watch for everyone, with a powerful story of healing and a great amount of beautiful and much-needed representation.

Jay Snow is a freelance writer. He has published many places on the internet. For more of his thoughts on television and to see his other work (or to simply watch him gush again and again over his love for the original Charmed) follow him @snowyjay.

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