Review: NBC's 'Found,' Starring Shanola Hampton, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Kelli Williams

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 18, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 18, 2023 |

NBC’s Found is a great premise and a solid cast in search of a decent show. The series spent a few years in development and was originally scheduled to premiere as a midseason replacement last season. They pushed it to 2024 during a fall season with little scripted competition. It premiered to solid linear ratings and became NBC’s most successful series launch on Peacock.

That’s great news, particularly for Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who has had a challenging run on network television over the last decade following the cancellations of Pitch and The Passage after one season and Mixed-ish after two. Here, he plays Hugh “Sir” Evans, a man who kidnapped Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) as a teenager, along with a younger girl, Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh). They lived in Evans’ basement, and he treated them as his unwilling family for over a year before they escaped.

In the present, Gabi is a “recovery specialist” who helps families find missing persons; Lacey is a law student who works at her firm, along with a few other broken people: Margaret (Kelli Williams), her lead detective who lost a child of her own; and Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta), who is the tech geek who was abducted as a child and, as a result, doesn’t leave his apartment because of agorophobia. Bret Dalton (Agents of SHIELD) plays the police detective who assists Gabi’s firm.

Meanwhile, Gabi has secretly kidnapped Hugh Evans, who now lives chained up in her basement and operates as her Hannibal Lector-type: He helps her find missing people in exchange for reading material and grooming supplies. He also doesn’t seem to be that bothered about living in her basement; he may even like it.

Creator Nkechi Okoro Carroll’s elevator pitch to executives must have been outstanding: It will be a missing person procedural that will focus not on the missing white girls but the marginalized missing people that the media (and society) often ignores, and the twist is that Zach from Saved by the Bell will play the villain with whom the lead has some strange chemistry.

Unfortunately, the execution falls apart on the small screen because the writing is so bad. It often feels as though a histrionic, heavy-handed AI with a bad sentimental streak has written it. It is cringey enough that not even the talents of Hampton, Mark-Paul, and the Kelli Williams from The Practice can sell it.

It’s all very silly. The cases are silly. The interactions between Gabi and Hugh are silly. And the way the agency functions is silly. But it’s not silly enough to be ludicrously fun … and least not yet. We’ll see if it survives long enough for Gabi and her kidnapper/abductee to become her lover. This is a show that almost need to jump the rails because it’s not a trainwreck that you can’t stop watching so much as it is a malfunctioning train that is holding up traffic.

It’s a bad show that I really wanted to be good. It’s not even good relative to other network procedurals. It’s crap, so of course it will run for five seasons, so we can all take solace in the fact that Hampton, Mark-Paul, and Kelli are getting steady paychecks for a while.