‘Found’ Creator, Star Shanola Hampton on How Leaving The Basement Fuels Even More Drama in Season 2

[This story contains spoilers from the season two premiere of Found.]

Not so long ago, NBC’s hit show Found would have had Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) keep her former English teacher and captor Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) in the basement for another season or two. But that way of doing TV, says Found creator/showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll, has passed. “Not in this day and age, with streaming and binge-watching and how aggressively our audience moves through content… if we’d created this show maybe 10 years ago, we probably could have,” she explained to The Hollywood Reporter from the show’s set in Atlanta.

“It was a much more traditional TV watching model then,” Carroll added of television’s past, when there were 22-episode seasons that ran once live then again in re-runs in the summer. “Not just our industry, but our audience has changed the way they consume content. I don’t know that we would have been able to slow roll it that much in this day and age. And because there is so much story to tell, I wasn’t worried that we’re going to burn through it too quickly.”

In its second season, Found is still about public relations specialist Gabi Mosely using her professional expertise and personal experience as a kidnapping survivor in her teens to bring home missing people who don’t garner media attention due to race, sexual orientation and other factors. Assisting her at Mosley & Associates, or M & A, is a team bonded by trauma — Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh) whom Sir kidnapped to keep Gabi company, Margaret (Kelli Williams) whose son has been missing for over a decade, tech genius Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta) who was abducted as a child and has debilitating agoraphobia as a result and the military vet and security expert Dhan (Karan Oberoi) who was held captive for three years and silently suffers despite having a therapist husband.

DC cop Detective Mark Trent (Brett Dalton), or Trent, is both Gabi’s love interest and reluctant ally. With Sir on the loose and Gabi’s secret exposed, as well as one important member missing, the team is not as close as they once were. Gabi has lost their respect and trust and it’s doubtful if she can get it back.

It’s a direction that star Shanola Hampton admitted she didn’t see coming when speaking in the lead-up to the second season, which launched Oct. 3: “In my mind, I was like, ‘Okay, now they can’t let him out of the basement.’ This dynamic has played so well. The fans have really gravitated to it. How do you top that?” she said. “How do you still get the dynamic between Gabi and Sir without him being in the basement?’”

Adding to THR, “But NK [as they call Carroll] and the writers have a crazy and sick mind, so they’re able to get him out of there and still have that dynamic play. And it’s creepier in so many ways because he’s on the loose. So he’s always haunting and around without him being in the basement. It’s really lovely — this cat-and-mouse chase.”

Intriguingly, season two answers some questions while also posing new ones, which Carroll takes as a compliment. “That is my job,” she said, “to answer some, but give you more questions to ask so you have to continue watching. Because [Gabi’s] purpose was so driven by what happened to her, there’s so much story for us to unpack. There are so many questions to answer about both of their lives during that gap, and how that serves as a blessing and a curse when it comes to fighting for other people. My hope is that, with season two, we’re answering some questions, but then as that door is being closed, the window pops open, and everyone’s like, ‘ah, crap, now I want to know more about this,’ because that’s what keeps people tuning in.”

Procedurals, said Hampton, noting Law & Order, SVU, and Blacklist, are what NBC does well. “I think that they have taken the market by storm when it comes to telling those kinds of stories,” she added. “I think what people have gravitated to for Found is that there’s a twist. So not only do you get the procedurals that you love, but then you get these characters that are broken and are in a healing process. And each human being has some form of healing that they’ve had to do throughout life, or you haven’t lived. So I think [the audience] has grabbed on to the emotion of these individual characters.”

Expanding beyond Sir and Gabi has been a goal for Carroll since Found’s inception. “We were always going to slowly pull back the layers on the other characters. Of course, season one’s flashback storylines were going to center around teen Gabi and her origin story,” said Carroll. “In season two, we were very intentional about what we layered in about the other characters to give you just enough to make you hungry for their backstories. And when we tell those flashback stories for that character, they very much tie in present day with what they’re dealing with, and always have a connection back to Sir, even though he didn’t serve as part of their past.”

More pronounced this season is Escarpeta’s character Zeke. “Zeke’s boundaries are really being tested,” Escarpeta told THR. “With Sir being out, things are ripping at the seams. The team is not the team we thought we were. People are picking sides and finding themselves almost standing alone, a place that Zeke hasn’t been in for a long time. He has really leaned on the M & A family, for that strength, for those eyes outside and the feeling of being a part of something special. And so now he’s going to find himself very much dealing with himself and his real feelings and trying to be the strongest that he can be without the support of the team. And obviously Zeke loves Gabi, but Gabi did something that, in Zeke’s mind, is almost unforgivable.”

Despite Dhan and Zeke’s strong bond, brotherhood even, Dhan is Team Gabi almost no matter what. For Karan Oberoi, Dhan’s “barometer for justice” is broader than the rest of the team, mainly because, in the military, he did whatever was needed to get the job done. “The confines for him are stretched out a little bit more than everybody else,” said Oberoi. “In the first season, Dhan says to Gabi, ‘I understand what you did. Did we save a life?’ [For him], at the end of the day, we have to save lives. Whatever we got to do, we have to bring people home.”

But Dhan also needs M&A for personal reasons. “If he doesn’t have this family, his trauma comes up. He needs everyone in M & A to continue solving cases, to continue to find people, [because] it’s his healing,” explained Oberoi. In season two, “He’s trying to keep M & A together. [After] the secret that was let out last season, everything’s up in the air. We have a target on our backs now with Sir looking for everybody, and [Dhan] is trying to keep the family together and simultaneously protect them.”

Hampton can’t wait for fans to dig into the new season. “I’m so looking forward to them seeing the consequences of Gabi’s actions through everybody else’s lens. I’m excited for them to feel the cat and mouse that happens with Sir not being in the basement,” she said. “These first few episodes come out of the gate just swinging. And I’m super proud.”

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Found season two releases new episodes Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC, streaming next day on Peacock.