The cast and creator of this dark, poignant missing-persons drama discuss a second season that blows up the status quo
To say that Found is changing its game in season two is to risk understatement, and even that is putting it mildly.
The drama series returns with an enormous shift in its premise. Sir (played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the kidnapping victim of recovery specialist Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) — who was abducted and held captive by him years earlier — has escaped from the basement prison she held him in, prompting her to reveal her formerly secret actions to her squad. They’re still processing the information as the new episodes begin, with Sir still missing, though circumstances suggest he’s not done invading Gabi’s life. Her colleague Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh), also a former victim of Sir, is a particular target as well.
“It is what I like to call a ‘character-cedural,’” creator Nkechi Okoro Carroll says of the show, “so we’re still going to have a case of the week. We’re still going to have that engine of reaching a point of completion with our cases every week, but it’s got a significant serialized portion. Sir’s out on the loose wreaking havoc. Mark-Paul [Gosselaar] is having way too much fun doing that, so that will definitely maintain as part of the show, but we will still have that satisfying puzzle that we want the audience to join us
in solving every week.”
A veteran of many series, from Saved By the Bell to NYPD Blue to the Saved By the Bell reboot, Gosselaar reasons that especially with the second-year changes, Found is “this dance that you have to trust [Carroll] and her team to provide us the floor to be creative on, but also to feel that it’s not forced. With every script that we got, I remember I kept calling saying, ‘How can we continue this trajectory?’ I’m very, very, very pleased and very excited for our fans and our audience to watch the second season because, for everything that we built up in the first season, there is going to be a payoff if you’ve put the time into our show.”
Found star Hampton earned a Gracie Award for season one, and she notes, “We don’t wrap things up with a little bow in one or two episodes. The healing process, as in life, takes time . . . so Gabi Mosely is in this dark place, having to deal with the dynamics shifting with the entire team. That’s the beautiful journey of this season, which I’m really excited for the audience to see and to experience going through the process with these characters.
“It’s been a different journey for me as an actor to play because Gabi is always in control and people are looking up to her. In this season, for the majority of the first chapter, everyone’s really [mad] at her and disappointed and sad. It weighs on you.”
Co-star Kelli Williams (who plays fellow investigator Margaret Reed) will be a director for Found during season two, an extra duty she also performed as a regular cast member in the law drama The Practice. “I was primarily directing just full-time and not acting,” she says of her career activity in recent years, “so I’m back to that challenge of sort of splitting my brain.
“It’ll be interesting to see how my castmates respond to me [while directing] because it’s a strange feeling to be in a scene but also not watching in that sort of more-like-giving-notes way. It’s going to be fun because our group gets along so well, and I think everyone is excited and supportive. And, of course, I’m going to mess with them a little bit.”
As for specific, case-of-the-week subjects that will be addressed this year, Carroll reveals: “We deal with the mortality rate of Black mothers. We deal with neurodiverse kids, something that’s very personal to me. We deal with how grief, especially in the Black community, can be misconstrued. And all of it is pulled from personal experience, whether it’s from our writers or our crew. We put it all in the jambalaya, and out come these episodes.”
“Quite frankly, every time I think, ‘OK, this is the craziest version of this story we could do, but it’ll help us bring light to it, so it’s great,’” the creator continues. “Literally the moment after we shoot it, some news reports come out and I’m like, ‘We didn’t do the craziest version. I was wrong.’ And it’s shocking. So we continue to be inspired by all of our experiences and everything that happens in the world, and then we put our Found spin on it.”
Season two of Found airs Thursday, October 3, on City & NBC