FOUND – Season Two Key Art | ©2024 NBCUniversal

Nkechi Okoro Carroll is the creator/executive producer of FOUND, now on Thursday nights on NBC in its second season, with episodes streaming subsequently on Peacock.

In FOUND, crisis manager Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton), heads up Mosely & Associates, or M&A, a firm that specializes in finding overlooked people who are missing and/or have been abducted. Gabi’s colleagues and friends know that her dedication to her calling comes from her experience of having been abducted and held captive for over a year by her high school teacher Hugh Evans, aka “Sir” (Mark-Paul Gosselaar).

What Gabi’s circle doesn’t know is that she’s managed to turn the tables on Sir, kidnapping him, keeping him locked up in her basement, and getting his advice on how to approach her cases. But at the start of Season 2, Sir has escaped, and now he and the secret are both out, to the consternation of Gabi’s allies.

Carroll is also the creator of ALL-AMERICAN: HOMECOMING, now in its third and final season on The CW, and an executive producer on that show’s parent series, ALL-AMERICAN, which has been renewed for a seventh season on The CW.

Born in Nigeria and raised there and in New York, Cote d’Ivoire, and England, Carroll began her career in theatre before transitioning to film and television.

When NBC has a Q&A panel for FOUND for the Television Critics Association (TCA) summer press tour, Carroll participates. Later that day, NBC throws a party for its networks and for the TCA, where Carroll makes time for a one-on-one follow-up discussion. This interview combines her panel comments and the later conversation.

While creating and maintaining FOUND, did Carroll and her writing team interview people who have been through a kidnapping experience?

“Not so much interviewing them directly, mostly because we’re not trying to exploit any one person’s particular story. We’ve done a lot of research around different missing people cases, a lot of research behind the psychology of it. We’ve talked with psychiatrists, therapists, a lot of foundations that deal with specifically missing people of color or missing people of marginalized groups. We’ve worked with them as well.

“And then, unfortunately, there has been a lot of personal experience in terms of a number of people involved in the show who have been very generous with sharing their experiences with trauma. All of that feeds into the show.”

In the first episode of Season 2, Sir re-abducts a previous victim, Gabi’s good friend Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh). The two young women were held captive together for a time. Was it difficult retaining FOUND’s procedural structure in light of the frantic search for Lacey?

“Lacey becomes the case in the [second season’s] first episode, and then, moving forward from that, we still have our case of the week, every single episode. Some of them, they’re juggling working on that case while they’re dealing with other things, and some of those other cases take their full attention, but there will still be a case of the week. We’re very similar to Season 1 in that it is what I like to call a ‘character-cedural,’ so we’re still going to have that engine of reaching a point of completion with our cases every week, but it has got a significant serialized portion.

NBCUNIVERSAL EVENTS — Press Tour, July 2024 — NBCU Portrait Studio — Pictured: Nkechi Okoro Carroll, “Found” NBC — (Photo by: JSquared Photography/NBCUniversal)

“I mean, Sir’s out on the loose, wreaking havoc. Mark-Paul is having way too much fun doing that, so that will definitely maintain as part of the show, but we still will have that satisfying puzzle that we want to audience to join us in solving every week. Gabi is going to struggle to be able to achieve both of those things.”

Some of the themes in Season 2 include, Carroll previews, “the mortality rate of Black mothers. We deal with neuro-diverse 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 experiences, whether it’s from our writers or our crew. Unfortunately, everyone’s finger has touched something. So, everyone is bringing some kind of personal experience to it. We put it all in the jambalaya, and out come these episodes.

“Quite frankly, every time I think, ‘Okay, this is the craziest version of this story we could do, but it’ll help us bring light to it, so it’s great.’ 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.”

Sir is now free of the basement, but not of his fixation on Gabi. “Sir’s endgame is Gabi, period,” Carroll explains, “in whatever way that looks given the obstacles he’s presented with, in whatever way it turns out, given how much the M&A team and [police detective Mark] Trent [played by Brett Dalton] and everyone else is fighting to keep her out of his clutches. His endgame has been singular since the day she walked into his high school classroom.”

As Gabi and Sir are no longer (usually) on the same premises, Carroll says new ways had to be devised to keep the characters in contact. “This is where I give credit to the incredible team of writers that works on FOUND. We all got very creative in terms of how we kept that connection between Sir and Gabi.”

Likewise, this meant expanding FOUND’s locations. “Shout out to our locations team on the show, because I did present them with the challenge of ‘he’s on the run, but we need these moments.’ Everyone just stepped their game up, because so much of the magic of Sir and Gabrielle’s relationship happens when they’re face to face.

“So, the challenge was, how do we maintain that while being authentic and truthful to a person who’s on the run, and someone who is chasing them in a very different way?”

Carroll also praises her leading actors. “Thank you to Mark-Paul and Shanola for being so open to how creative we got with it, and diving in headfirst. You guys truly elevated everything we threw at you, so thank you.”

Clearly, when Carroll created FOUND, she had strong ideas about who her main characters were. Have they changed at all due to the way the actors are playing them, and/or has Carroll started writing toward the actors’ performances?

“Honestly, it hasn’t really changed. I guess the part that maybe has changed a little bit is, I’m in constant communication with my actors. We talk at the start of the season, we talk at the end of the season, because there’s ownership for them as well over these characters they portray, but the hearts of the characters have not changed from what I envisioned.

“On purpose, because there’s a very specific journey we’re telling on this show. If I based it on the incredible actors and what they bring to the show, Sir would be working at M&A by now, because I love that character so much, I love Mark-Paul so much. But we’ve had to stay true to the heart of that character and the intention of the show.”

Given that actor Gosselaar has a commanding presence as Sir, has Carroll had any concerns about glamorizing stalking and obsession?

“No, because we do the exact opposite of glamorizing it. What we don’t have control over is how much our fans ship Gabi and Sir. Which I’ve been very clear about from the beginning is not an intention of the show.

“God bless Mark-Paul and Shanola for just having such tremendous chemistry in real life that you can’t even dim it on the screen if you tried, but it is one hundred percent a show where we intentionally are very careful not to glamorize what is happening with Sir, and what is happening with Gabi, and it’s one of the reasons why I always say this is not Sir’s redemption story. I love Mark-Paul Gosselaar, it is incredibly fun to write for that character, but our North Star with that character is never about redeeming him, no matter how much he, the character, seeks redemption. There’s no redeeming what he’s done.”

The other characters often still refer to Hugh Evans as “Sir.” If that’s what he wants to be called, it seems like they would not want to oblige him, so why don’t they generally call him Hugh Evans?

“It’s so second nature for Gabi, she can’t even catch herself. So, those moments where she actually calls him Hugh Evans are very intentional. Half the time, though, she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, and she’s only referred to him as that for so long that everyone around her refers to him as that, until someone brings it up, and brings up the use of his name, and you see that moment where everyone pauses and realizes the trap they fell into. So, it’s very intentional when they use ‘Sir’ and when they use his actual name.”

Carroll is also still on both ALL-AMERICAN and ALL-AMERICAN: HOMECOMING. How is she juggling those responsibilities with FOUND?

“With very little sleep, and a lot of caffeine. But I genuinely love what I do, I genuinely love all three shows. And so, it’s one foot in front of the other, but it’s a challenge I thoroughly enjoy. And I have incredible, incredible help in my writing staff on all three shows.”

There are no plans to wrap up FOUND any time soon. “When I started Season 1,” Carroll relates, “I had the first five seasons [mapped out]. You have to, on shows like this, otherwise you can’t plant the seeds. I’m a little OCD about planting the seeds. “

And now, “I’ve got more. I talk with the actors in broad terms about what their arc is for the season, so that they understand if something [seemingly] random comes up in a script, it’s like, ‘Oh, right, she’s planting the seed for X that’s coming up.’ I just believe it helps them do their job better if they have a rough idea of where their character’s journey is.”

Also, “At the start of every season, I have a fifteen-page document I give my writers’ room that talks about every character’s North Star, the big pillars we’re going to hit on our way there. Then I tell them I’m so not the smartest person in the room, so please find me a better journey to this North Star, and they come in and kill it. So, yeah, that’s how far advanced I plan.

“Now that Season 1 is in the bag, and we’re [on] Season 2, what Seasons 6 and 7 look like is already being plotted out, so that I can, again, retroactively plant my seed. So, I’ve got a good thirty seasons in me, NBC, just so we’re clear,” Carroll laughs.

And what would Carroll most like people to know about Season 2 of FOUND?

“We definitely don’t take our foot off the gas for a very long time. It’s going to be quite a thrilling ride from Episode 1 through to 22, which I think surprised even us.”

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Article:FOUND: Creator and executive producer Nkechi Okoro Carroll on Season 2 of the NBC thriller – Exclusive Interview

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