‘Found’ brings missing marginalized people into the spotlight

By Max Gao, NBC News

Shanola Hampton’s character on the NBC drama “Found,” which is returning for season two, grapples with her troubled past and her complicated present. 

After 11 seasons of playing the vivacious Veronica Fisher on the Showtime family dramedy “Shameless,” Shanola Hampton knew she wanted her next project to be as socially relevant as it was creatively fulfilling. She found exactly what she was looking for in the NBC missing persons procedural drama “Found,” which returns for its sophomore season on Thursday.

Created by “All American” showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll, the hit series stars Hampton as Gabi Mosley, a public relations specialist who has dedicated her life to running a crisis management firm that specializes in tracking down marginalized people who slip through the cracks, years after surviving a year in captivity herself as a teenager.

“This is not something new that has been happening in our community,” Hampton told NBC News. “It has been talked about so much, but the mainstream world hasn’t discussed the discrepancies between people of color or underserved communities and the recognition they get in the media when they go missing compared to others.”

In 2017, Okoro Carroll came across a Time magazine article about the disappearance of more than a dozen Black and Latino children in the Washington, D.C., area, and the disproportionate lack of media coverage and police intervention they received compared to their white counterparts. That story cited the Black and Missing Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing awareness to missing people of color. Okoro Carroll did not consult the organization until the end of the first season, but said the founders have given their seal of approval.

Okoro Carroll began researching the role that public relations play in missing persons cases, which the Department of Justice has said can add up to 600,000 new missing people every year. She chose to set “Found” in the same world — with the added twist that Gabi has been secretly holding her former kidnapper, Sir, played by “Saved by the Bell” star Mark-Paul Gosselaar, hostage in her basement and using him to solve cases. (NBC and NBC News are both owned by Comcast.)

Read about Carroll’s concerns that such a show would be a hard sell to networks.

Watch the Season 2 trailer below.

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