"Found"

Last fall there was a showdown.  FOX premiered a new show called "Alert:  Missing Persons Unit" about some troubled and unique people who spend their lives finding the missing.  NBC was supposed to premiere a new show called "Found", about some troubled and unique people who spend their lives finding the missing.  FOX won round one and NBC pulled their premiere.  In the wake of the SAG strike, NBC has been taking shows off the shelf and finally premiered "Found".  As indicated, there are a lot of similarities between the two shows but also differences.  The FOX show covers a supposed goverment unit while the "Found" group is a private company.  Which means the characters on the NBC show break the rules.  A lot.  That's one of the themes.  Another theme is that the focus of "Found" is to go after the missing who don't get looked for by traditional law enforcement.  People of color, the undocumented, the indigenous, the unhoused, etc.  And there is a twist.  A "big twist".  One I don't particularly care for.  Between the heavily "issue focused" storylines and the twist, the plots are sometimes a bit strained in order to cover the moral lesson the producers want, rather than honor the truth of a given story.  I don't buy, for instance, that an adult man would kidnap a teenage girl and keep her for more than a year without physically or sexually abusing her.  That unrealistic idea is there to support the "big twist".  The plots are fairly predictable.  I can usually figure out the "who done it" in the first ten minutes or so, but these super-smart, hardworking folk can't, because, again, they need the "big twist" character to help solve the crime.  It's a bit irritating, and undermines the power of the leads.  I also really don't care for the fact that they make a big deal about this being in DC, but clearly have never been in DC.  The series is filmed in Canada, and while the leads are on point a number of the weekly guest actors have been ... iffy.  And ... have I mentioned? I really really really hate it when DC is used as a background for a film, TV show or book and the creators do absolutely no research and everything they say about the region is wrong.  (Yes, I'm talking to you, "NCIS", who once famously had a character refer to it as the "tri-state" area.  Dude.  DC is NOT a state.  And no, no one on NCIS pronounces Norfolk correctly.)  Anyway, a recent episode had a character who lived in the district indicate that she had been "avoiding going to Virginia."  Given the geography of the city, "avoiding Virginia" would be near to impossible.  The story also focused, heavily, on a big Indian Reservation in the Virginia, which was "at least" three hours south of DC.  Except, there aren't any Federal Indian reservations here, with "tribal land, tribal police, and a no man's land of forest separating it from the non-tribal land."  There are two small plots of land set aside which are not federal reservations and are fairly unpopulated ... more like state parks than anything else.  They are less than a two hour drive down a major highway. So, I have issues with "Found".  Frankly, I have issues with "Alert:  Missing Persons Unit" too, which could lean into melodrama.  Neither show deeply engages me.  They are about entertainment.  They both try to be thought-provoking but they both fail, because, again, they are too detached from reality.  They have decent casts and are a way to spend an hour, but that's about it.