I had a couple
of reasons to watch the new NBC series Found,
most of it having to do with its cast than any idea of quality. I did not
expect to respond to it so quickly and so viscerally. First a little backstory.
No matter how
erratic Shameless was over the eleven seasons it was on the air, one of
the few stabilizing forces it had was the next door couple of Kev and V, the next-door
neighbors, partners in crime and family in all but name. Shanola Hampton and Steve
Howey were just as willing to do anything to survive as the Gallagher clan but
while they had many of the same problems in their families, they were never as
broken because they had each other through thick and thin. They didn’t actually
get married until near the end of the run, and they had their share of ups and
downs but you always knew they’d be there for each other no matter what.
Hampton was,
in a way, the most sexualized member of the entire cast though much of this was
by design: in the early seasons, they provided sexualized internet content in
order to make ends meet and she spent a fair amount of the middle of the series
questioning her sexuality. Hampton has
done the occasional film or guest starring role throughout her decade long run
on Shameless but she never got a chance to start in any major film. Found
is her coming out party and she seized onto the role of Gabi Mosely with
the relish and fire that she never got a chance to show on Shameless or frankly
anywhere else.
Hampton plays
Gabi Mosely, who is the head of crisis management team in Washington D.C., that
specializes in finding missing people. Because Hampton is an African-American
woman and her character takes no prisoners with authorities but is kind to her
team, because her team is made up of people who were broken before she found
them, and because the series is set in D.C., the parallel to Scandal and
How To Get Away With Murder would no doubt run through the minds of
anyone who heard the basic summary.
But Gabi
Mosley is anything but a pale imitation of Olivia Pope. I would actually go
further and say that Gabi Mosley would look down at both her and Annalyse
Keating with withering contempt if anyone even dared to compare her to either
one. Indeed, from the moment we see here
pretending to be lost and hopeless to get a wary low-life reluctant confidence
in order to get inside a warehouse and the moment she does, she throws him against
the wall and puts one of her heels on her chest, you know that Gabi lives in a
world that Olivia Pope did everything in her power to avoid on Scandal and
that Annalyse Keating did everything to pretend didn’t exist until it was forced
upon her. Indeed, there’s a critical moment in the first act of the Pilot when,
trying to help find a missing foster child, she stages a media conference that
Olivia Pope would never dream of doing because she’s spent her life avoiding them.
Gabi shows a
cell phone picture of a young girl to the media and asked them who she is. A
reporter recognizes her instantly: she is the young daughter of a Senator who
has been missing less than twenty-four hours and has already been plastered all
over every media content in the world. Then she holds up the picture of her
client – a young African-American foster child – and asks the same question to
dead silence. She then makes the mission statement of Found in which she
tells us what we all know but tend to forget: thousands of people go missing in
America every year, but it is only the white ones who get the media attention and
only the famous ones who are noticed.
Anyone who even knows the bare bones of Scandal knows that Olivia
Pope would not only be working for the Senator’s family to find the missing
child but condemn Gabi for taking attention from this situation. Similarly Gabi
would view Olivia and Annalyse with contempt if not outright loathing. With
good reason, in the world Gabi inhabits the Olivia Popes and Annalyse Keatings
are doing everything in their power to make sure the status quo remains
intact. She would see their rescuing of
the broken as less an action to save them but as a matter to assuage their own
guilt (which would be true for several of both Olivia’s ‘gladiators’ and The
Keating Five) and trying to make them acolytes if not mirrors of themselves.
Both Shondaland heroines only see their acts of salvation as to what they can
do for them; Gabi sees her team as people she is trying to save as much for
themselves as for the victims.
In just two
episodes, the four members of Gabi’s team are infinitely more fascinating than
any of the members of Pope’s and Keating’s entourage would be in their entire
runs of the series. All of them are as
broken as the members of those groups – perhaps more so – but Gabi has done everything
in her power to make them work together for their own good. The most brilliant
member to watch is Kelli Williams. Those of you who remember her work as
Lindsey Dole, the ambitious young attorney she played on The Practice will be astonished by
her work here. She has done a fair amount of work in TV in the past twenty
years – most notably in Lie to Me and Army Wives but her work as
Margaret Reed is incredible. Over many
years she has found a ‘non-superpower power’ in which she can read body
language and instantly tell if a person is telling the truth or lying about
something. Some of you might assume she’s
become Cal Lightman, but the reason is far more traumatic. Twelve years ago her
son went missing in a bus stop in DC and she has spent all that time looking
for it. In the ending montage we see that she still spends every night seating
in that same bus depot with her son’s lunch box and missing pictures, looking
at every bystander to see if there’s a hint of her son. Williams is already
mesmerizing to watch every second she’s on screen.
Of course every
member of her team is damaged. Dhan is a
soldier who has been recovering from trauma and is still dealing with it in an
abrasive fashion. (However, he seems to be happily married to a man who is his
former therapist.) Zeke is a twentyish agoraphobic who is the major tech expert
for the team, even though he never leaves his house. We don’t yet note the
source of his trauma, but we suspect its because of his abduction. Lacey Quinn
is Gabi’s most loyal friend who was abducted herself as a young girl – which is
how she knows Gabi in the first place.
That is one of
the major hooks in the series. As a young girl Gabi was abducted by a man she
only referred to as Sir. Found spends
as much time dealing with teenage Gabi’s captivity as it does with the cases
she handles, and what we see is horrifying. It doesn’t seem – though we’re not sure – that
Sir’s abduction of Gabi was sexual in nature. Rather it looks like he was
trying to raise her as both his daughter
and a willing acolyte to his genius. At the climax of the flashbacks in the
Pilot Gabi hits Sir with a frying pan and she and Lacey escape. When the police go back to Sir’s cabin, he
has vanished and has been gone for twenty years.
It is here I
really wish the promos for Found has not been so determined to spoil the
revelation of the finale because for weeks I was deluged with it and it didn’t
have the impact it would have had if NBC had been cagier. You see seven months
prior to the pilot, Gabi somehow tracked down Sir and currently has him chained
to the wall in her basement. We also
know that’s around the time she started her agency – and that she’s using him
as a consultant on her worst cases.
What is a
revelation is the work of Mark-Paul Gosselaar. I have been watching him in TV
since he made his debut in Saved By The Bell. I have seen him do superb
work in the latter seasons of NYPD Blue and inferior work in TNT series
that were beneath anybody. (I’m still not sure if he was Franklin or Bash.) But
I think it’s safe to say we’ve never seen him play a character like Sir before.
You get the feeling in the flashbacks that Sir could have been able to hide in
plain sight as long as he did because he has the ability to appear normal in
the everyday world and occasionally in the dinners he stages with Gabi. But there’s insanity in every scene he’s in
that makes us doubt how he could have passed for more than a few minutes. He writes scripts for Gabi as
a child for ‘dinner conversation’ and demands she follows it to the letter. In
the second episode he shows up with a cake to celebrate her first birthday and
when she is not joyous drops on the table and tells her if she doesn’t like it,
she will eat nothing. He doesn’t hear
anything except what he wants to hear and is fastidious about discipline and
his own genius.
His scenes in
the present are even more frightening because even though he is a prisoner, he’s
still trying to gain control over Gabi. We still don’t know how she tracked him
down or what her long term plans are but there’s an underlying assumption that
this is truly how she intends to work through her trauma. Considering she’s
currently keeping him locked in her basement, this is the kind of solution you
know will fall apart soon – and the fact that she’s now in the public eye more
than usual is going to be the kind of thing that will put her under scrutiny.
There’s also a
different subtext. Lacey was abducted eight days before Gabi escaped and saved
them both. Gabi has spent her entire life under the same kind of trauma that
Lacey has, and there is a possibility she did this out of some kind of effort
to make things right for both of them. But it has turned into something far
different – and there was a revelation in the final minute of last night’s
episode (I’m not going to spoil this one) that gives Gabi another reason
to withhold what she’s been doing from her most loyal friend.
I honestly don’t
know what I was expecting when I decided to watch Found – it’s likely
that it had more to do with the slim pickings that the strikes in Hollywood
have left the viewer with this fall. I
certainly didn’t expect to think of it as more than a placeholder until the
final season of Fargo debuts on FX this November. But having seen the first two episodes I am
hooked on this series in a way that I just haven’t been on a network drama
since Will Trent debuted at the start of this year. Like that series, it
seems to follow a formula but the cases it investigates and the backstory of so
many of the characters make it anything but formulaic. I don’t know if Found
will achieve the same success that Will Trent did, but like it, the
show has the potential to be one of the best series of 2023.
My score: 4.5
stars.
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