‘Found’ Director On Setting The Tone For The NBC Procedural, Its ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ Connection & What’s To Come
11.10.2023 - 03:23
/ deadline.com
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Tuesday’s episode of Found on NBC.
In any given year, more than half of those who are reported missing are people of color.
NBC’s latest missing persons procedural, Found, seeks to shed a light on this statistic through its case-of-the-week story format. Last week’s premiere introduced audiences to Shanola Hampton’s Gabi Moseley, a former missing person herself who now works round the clock to ensure no missing person slips through the cracks.
Her crisis management team includes several others who have close ties to missing persons cases, including Gabrielle Walsh’s Lacey Quinn — who was also abducted by the same man who kidnapped Gabi. What Lacey and the rest of the world don’t know is that her kidnapper, known as Sir (played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar), is no longer a threat. That’s because Gabi has found him and is currently holding him hostage in her home and forcing him to help her solve each missing persons case.
It’s a sinister plot twist akin to Silence of the Lambs. So, perhaps it makes sense that DeMane Davis, who also worked on that film’s TV spinoff Clarice, would be tapped to direct the first two episodes of Found.
“To me, that felt like, ‘Oh, look at what you did. You worked on Clarice, and then you get the opportunity to do this pilot and it feels like you have this language in you and now you can give that to someone else,'” Davis told Deadline.
Davis worked closely with creator Nkechi Okoro Carroll to set the tone of the series through its first two missing persons cases — the first of a foster youth and the second of a sex worker, both of whom are neglected by the system due to their circumstances. She speaks about the experience in the interview below.
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