This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
One of the things I love about TV is that it exposes how deranged we are.
We’ve all had this conversation with someone. They just had a few days off, or maybe it was a long weekend. You ask them what they did, and they talk about how they treated themselves: They laid on the couch and watched countless episodes of Law & Order: SVU.
Yes, there is nothing more relaxing that an hourlong rape and murder case.
I don’t know how we got to a place where “self-care” became synonymous with “sexual assault of the week,” but that genre of procedural has become a part of the same “comfort” conversation as pumpkin spice lattes, warm blankets, and Taylor Swift’s Folklore album.
I’ve thought about you weirdos a lot in recent weeks. While, yes, there is an endless SVU library available to stream, the Hollywood strikes meant that you were going to be deprived of your Olivia Benson fix this fall. And what is fall, but an occasion to do Meg Ryan cosplay in a glorious chunky sweater, go apple picking, and then watch Mariska Hargitay spell out the explicit details of a domestic violence case?
Luckily, I’ve found Found. (And I laughed while typing that.)
I don’t know what NBC knew, but the network somehow had the wisdom to hold its best original series to premiere during the content drought incited by billionaire executives ignorantly refusing to pay the creatives whose work their money is made off of their worth. (That is, the WGA and SAG strikes.) So, while other networks don’t have splashy scripted series to air on the fall lineup, as is custom, NBC has Found. Or, as I like to call it, What You Should Watch While You Miss SVU.
Found has everything you want from a procedural series. In the span of five minutes, I groaned at the predictability of the dialogue and also cried at a poignant reunion. This is the exact experience we crave from a 43-minute episode about a traumatizing event that is both introduced and solved by the time the credits roll.
Found stars Shanola Hampton (shout out to my fellow Shameless fans) as Gabi Mosely, a hybrid of Olivia Benson and Olivia Pope (shout out to my Olivias) who specializes in tracking down kidnapped people and reuniting them with their families. She employs a crisis management team who, like her, all have personal experience that relates to the job. But Gabi’s history is the show’s real twist, the one that elevates it from just your average procedural to something more intriguing.
In the premiere, we learn that Gabi was kidnapped when she was younger. Now, it’s her mission to advocate for the victims who don’t get splashy media coverage, usually because they are women of color or from poor families. It’s who her accomplice is in this endeavor that’s a major surprise.
If you’ve seen commercials for Found, you know that Mark-Paul Gosselaar is the show’s big star. It might have been startling, then, to see him for the first time during one of Gabi’s flashback scenes. He’s the man who kidnapped her. (Warning: Major spoiler in the next sentence!) You might think that means that you’ll only see him during the show’s flashbacks, but the final scene reveals the big twist: Gabi now has him imprisoned in her basement. He’s her advisor, using his own kidnapping brilliance to help her figure out how to rescue her clients.
Silence of the Lambs-meets-Scandal, inspired by SVU. Does it sound like a TV show premise generated by AI? Yes. Do we love it anyway? Also yes.
Beyond the gratification of the case-of-the-week premise, the greatest endorsement the show has is that it stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar. We don’t talk enough about how he’s the most underappreciated actor in television. Yes, obviously, he was on Saved By the Bell. He was also one of the most hilarious parts of the series’ Peacock reboot, which was one of the sharpest and funniest comedies when it was airing—but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.
Gosselaar also has impeccable taste in projects, even if they don’t become the hits they deserve to be. I’m sitting here waiting for Franklin & Bash to have the same renaissance on streaming that Suits has right now. No one is better at playing themselves than he is, as exhibited in Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 and Barry. He may have been the sexiest guest star there ever was on Weeds. And here is where we have all failed: Pitch, the 2016 series from the This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, premiered the same year as the award-winning Kleenex endorsement, and was better than it.
In Pitch, he played the catcher for the first female pitcher in the MLB. The show had a historic partnership with the league that allowed for the usage of trademark names and stadiums, as well as set forth a path for gender inclusivity. It was also beautifully written, a wrenching character study of two people who are bonded by the path of a fastball. The show was canceled because you fools didn’t watch; the same thing happened to Gosselaar’s latest series, the black-ish spin-off mixed-ish, despite it being one of the most exciting comedy offerings of the last few years.
I’m very glad Gosselaar is back in a show that seems to have all the ingredients that will convince you all to watch—and it’s exciting that he’s playing a character that seems like such a departure. Fall TV isn’t “back,” because of the strikes, but it’s great to have this one.
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