Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Found’ On NBC, About A Crisis Management Team That Finds People Who Are Missing

Some shows are harder to review than others; they’re usually the ones that have a lot of good elements to them, but a lot of bad ones, too. So what do you do: Do you dismiss the show for the stuff that stinks or take a positive tack and hope things improve? That’s the dilemma we faced with a new NBC procedural.

FOUND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “2003.” A house in the middle of the woods. A teenage girl is cooking something on a stove.

The Gist: A line of locks on the front door unlocks and a frightened girl walks in. She says her name is Bella (Jasmine Washington) and she wants to go back to her parents. The teen introduces herself as Gabi (Azaria Carter); she says she’ll help the girl. When Bella asks if they’re in her house, Gabi replies “no,” and when Bella then asks how long she’s been there, Gabi replies, “Too long.”

In the present day, Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) owns a DC-area crisis management firm whose primary task is to find people who have gone missing and have “fallen through the cracks.” These are people who get neither the attention of law enforcement or the media, despite suspicious circumstances around their disappearances.

We see what she can do when she makes her way into an abductor’s apartment by posing as a scantily-clad woman who got kicked out of her Uber. Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), the DCPD detective that works with Gabi and her staff, complains that her tactics are borderline illegal, but she doesn’t care, because she gets results. One other thing she does is she has one of her staffers, Lacey Quinn (Gabrielle Walsh) stay with the rescued person until they’re reunited with their families.

Other people working for her firm are Margaret Reed (Kelli Williams), a woman whose son has been missing for 13 years, who has become really good at observing human behavior; Dhan Rana (Karan Oberoi), who has his own abduction history; and Zeke Wallace (Arlen Escarpeta), an agoraphobe tech expert whose family funded Gabi’s firm.

A kid named Deron (Trayce Malachi) shows up at Dani’s firm’s office and wants her to find his 14-year-old foster sister. With the police preoccupied with finding a senator’s daughter, and her foster parents insisting that she’s done this before, Gabi insists on pushing forward, knowing that if she doesn’t help the girl, no one will.

But as she does that, she still thinks back to when she and Bella were held captive by a man they called Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), who would force them to sit for a formal dinner where Gabi would have to talk about the issues of the day. While she would snap back at him for forcing them to do this, there was still a lot of fear there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Found reminds us a bit of other missing persons procedurals like Without A Trace or Alert: Missing Persons Unit.

Our Take: Found is a procedural that holds our interest more for its backstories than the actual cases of the week themselves. There’s the big overriding backstory, which carries such a big twist that we can’t really discuss it here. Suffice to say, it involves just how Gabi was taken by Sir and how she ended up being with him for so long, and then there’s the matter of what happened after she and Bella managed to escape being held captive by him.

That story is very intertwined with the show’s premise, and not only because Gabi is driven by her experience of being a missing person who fell through the cracks. She has a knack for knowing how kidnappers think, and for that she may have some assistance.

Hampton is a fine lead here, conveying Gabi’s painful history along with the strength and determination she needs to take on both abductors and the DCPD. She seems to have some history with Trent, who seems to be more aligned with Gabi’s point of view than his eye-rollingly racist captain (Bill Kelly).

There are hints of the backstories of the other people at Gabi’s firm. Lacey’s backstory is deeper than the audience is shown at first, but we also have Margaret’s constant search for her son, as well as whatever is going on with Rana and Zeke. As the showrunner, Nkechi Okoro Carroll, and her writing staff reveal those stories, Found has the potential to become a show about a group of well-rounded characters working to solve these weekly cases.

The first case of the week was OK; we’ve seen worse, and we’ve seen better. There isn’t much of a mystery to solve along with Gabi and crew, and some of what Gabi is able to get away with would make anyone paying any attention throw up their hands in frustration. But if the backstories — especially the biggest one — develop the way we hope they will, those cases of the week might not matter as much.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Well, the the end has a massive twist, so we can’t exactly reveal it here.

Sleeper Star: We didn’t think Mark-Paul Gosselaar had it in him to play someone who’s almost pure evil, but he pulls off being a creepy child abductor pretty well.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Time to trigger that amber alert,” says Gabi after she, Lacey and Margaret see some circumstantial evidence at the foster parents’ home. As if it were that easy. Luckily, the silliness of that line is actually is addressed later on, when the DCPD doesn’t issue the alert right away.

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 written well, Found has the potential to be an above average network procedural.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid 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.