Found Could Have Been NBC’s Best New Procedural, But Then Season 2 Happened

Dick Wolf has made NBC a procedural powerhouse. The Law & Order franchise is still enduringly popular after more than 30 years on the air, and the One Chicago franchise has become another cornerstone of NBC’s primetime lineup over the last decade. However, with two such long-running empires, it’s notable that NBC does not have any newly promising dramas.

The best network procedurals balance compelling cases-of-the-week with enough serialized storytelling to reward longtime viewers for staying invested in the characters and their evolving relationships. Found, NBC’s 2023 crime drama, was a perfect network procedural because it had a built-in case-of-the-week engine through Mosely & Associates’ specialization in finding the marginalized people who slip through the cracks.

Found centered on an independent crisis management firm willing to take on cases that traditional institutions had overlooked. That gave the show the familiar engine of a network procedural without making it feel like another variation on the same cop-show formula. M&A could bend rules and advocate for victims in ways that characters working within those institutions could not.

It also had a serialized element in Gabi Mosely’s intriguing history that informed their present. Gabi herself was kidnapped as a teenager by “Sir,” only to turn the tables on him years later by holding her former captor prisoner in her basement and secretly using his criminal insight to help solve cases.

Unfortunately, Found muddied its formula in season 2 by allowing its serialized story to overwhelm the procedural that had made the series feel so promising. Instead of digging deeper into what an independent team could accomplish outside the restrictions of law enforcement, Found became increasingly consumed by Sir’s elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Gabi.

Found Season 2 Made A Clear Premise Too Complicated

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Found season 2 kept layering new lore onto a premise that was already complicated enough. After Sir escaped in the Found season 1 finale, the consequences of Gabi secretly holding him captive increasingly took precedence over the missing-person cases. The M&A team, the found family at the core of the series, was fractured by the revelation.

At the same time, Found kept expanding Sir’s backstory. Season 2 introduced his estranged brother Christian, who appeared genuinely horrified by what Sir had become and tried to help Gabi before eventually being murdered.

Even that wasn’t the end of the Evans family surprises in Found season 2. Gabi’s love interest, detective Trent, developed a relationship with lawyer Heather Tollin, only for the series to eventually reveal that Heather was actually Lena, Sir’s previously unknown half-sister. Lena wasn’t merely another relative: she had been secretly working with Sir and became a major antagonist herself.

Those twists might have worked in a more heavily serialized thriller, but they made Found increasingly unwieldy as a week-to-week network procedural. Viewers were being asked to follow an elaborate web of siblings, accomplices, kidnappings, betrayals, secret identities, and decades-old trauma while M&A continued introducing a new missing-person case almost every week.

The missing-person cases that once showcased what made M&A unique increasingly had to compete for airtime with the show’s expanding mythology. Instead of building on the elegant balance of season 1, Found kept adding stories until that foundation started to feel shaky.

Found Could Have Been NBC’s Next Long-Running Procedural

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NBC has two powerhouse procedural franchises in Law & Order and One Chicago, but the network has struggled to build another with the same staying power. SVU remains the crown jewel of Law & Order, while the original series was revived in 2022 after more than a decade off the air.

Criminal Intent lasted 10 seasons, and Organized Crime brought Elliot Stabler back for five seasons, but Trial by Jury, L.A., and True Crime never became lasting extensions. Perhaps SVU represents the ceiling of what Law & Order can achieve.

One Chicago found success with a different approach. Beginning with Chicago Fire in 2012, the universe quickly expanded to Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med, all three of which remain on the air. Only Chicago Justice failed to stick. Wolf found a remarkably durable formula by intertwining the professional and personal lives of first responders across a loosely connected universe.

Found could have been NBC’s next long-running procedural because it offered something those franchises didn’t: a team operating outside law enforcement. Unfortunately, season 2 complicated that promising formula, and Found was canceled before the season 2 finale. Its ratings had declined, although NBC’s need to make room for its new NBA package also contributed to a particularly aggressive round of cancellations.

NBC will try again with Line of Fire, premiering September 21, 2026. The new procedural takes almost the opposite approach, following a family working across the FBI, U.S. Marshals, Secret Service, and Department of Justice. It will also have a serialized component alongside the weekly cases. Hopefully, Line of Fire can find the balance that Found ultimately lost.

Release Date

2023 – 2025-00-00

Showrunner

Nkechi Okoro Carroll

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  Carrie Lazar

  Denise Price