“I’m learning that my imagination can go to so many places,” Diarra Kilpatrick said earlier this month.
It has certainly traveled far and wide over two seasons of “Diarra From Detroit.” Kilpatrick, 42, created and stars in this Paramount+ comic mystery that is part farce, part thriller, part social commentary and part-love story. Kilpatrick said her goal is simply a show that is “a good mystery and also is just really funny.”
The first season, which debuted on BET+ in 2024, introduces Diarra Brickland, an unhappy middle-school teacher who, amid divorcing her husband (Morris Chestnut), finds new purpose when Chris (Shannon Wallace), a man she meets on Tinder, disappears after their first date. She enlists her two best friends, Aja (DomiNque Perry) and Mr. Tea (Bryan Terrell Clark), to help investigate. Along the way, she learns about Detroit’s criminal underworld, Chris’s old family secrets and her own resiliency in the face of adversity.
In Season 2, which wraps up on Sept. 9, Chris has been found and Diarra is with him, though residual trauma from his kidnapping puts a strain on the relationship. Diarra finds herself torn between staying with him and getting back with her more stable ex-boyfriend Royce (Cliff Smith, better known as Method Man).
She also has been hired for her first real case, which involves a coldblooded assassin and Prohibition-era treasure in Detroit’s underground tunnels.
Evocative of the millennial angst of “Search Party” and the absurdism of “Atlanta,” “Diarra” is rare both in showcasing the vibrancy and class complexity of Black Detroit and in featuring a Black woman as a private eye. This season also delves into the history of the United States, covering topics like slavery and the Underground Railroad, bootlegging, African American freemasonry and mass incarceration.
Also: The clothes are gorgeous, the people are sexy, and it is really funny.
Kenya Barris (“Black-ish”), an executive producer, compared Kilpatrick’s sensibility to “some of our biggest contemporary female comedic minds, like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and in some ways Julia Louis-Dreyfus.”
“The show is very much in her voice,” Barris said in a phone interview. “Diarra sees something that she wants to say and wants to be the person to say it. And she doesn’t want to just say it — she wants to be the person to say it the way she’s going to say it. And she is tireless.”
Kilpatrick, who was raised in Detroit, previously created and starred in the short-form video series “American Koko,” another mystery show, and later appeared in HBO’s reboot of “Perry Mason.” Her mother was a schoolteacher and she grew up in a family of politicians: Kilpatrick’s father, Bernard, was a county commissioner, and her half brother, Kwame, was a congressmen and later mayor of Detroit.
In a 2013 corruption trial, her brother was convicted of 24 federal felony counts stemming from his time as mayor, including racketeering and extortion, and served seven years in prison; her father was convicted of tax evasion. This season, Kilpatrick explores how Black families are disproportionately impacted by imprisonment.
“It’s all in there,” she said. “I let everything that wants to come out, come back out.”
An hourlong interview with Kilpatrick became an adventure of its own as we hopped from a hotel bar to a restaurant to a New York City sidewalk, trying to find a quiet spot to talk. In that and a follow-up phone interview, she reflected on the show’s swerves “from the profane to the sacred” and how “Indiana Jones” inspired the current season. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
Who inspired your character, Diarra Brickland?
My mother called television the idiot box — she did not want me watching it. But my grandmother was different. She was always watching “Murder, She Wrote,” “Matlock” and “Perry Mason,” and I mainly watched television with her.
But my character is a teacher in one of the toughest schools in Detroit because teachers always seem like superheroes to me. My mother was a single parent who worked as a full-time teacher while getting her advanced degrees and raising me. Nothing could surprise or shock them, and they know a little about everything. Enough to solve crimes.
You’ve created and starred in “American Koko” and now “Diarra,” two Black woman detective stories. What draws you to this genre?
I love a story that has a finish line, and detective stories have that built in. It has been important to me that we succeed as a mystery, especially in Season 1, which I considered a girl’s point of view on “Chinatown.” We didn’t take the bite out of the mystery or the villains, but we sprinkled a little femininity and sentimentality over it.
This season I wanted to do an “Indiana Jones” for girls, because I love historical fiction. We’ve been left out of the genre, and I don’t want to complain about it — I want to get ahead of it.
There is a hilarious scene when Diarra and her friends are visiting the Underground Railroad Museum in Detroit, and the tour guide scolds them for talking about sex. How would you describe the tone of the show?
Sometimes in one scene the pendulum can swing from the profane to the sacred, from the ridiculous to the hilarious, from the adorable to the terrifying. Because that’s like the razor’s edge of being a woman. It is also just how my mind works: I am just as likely to make a joke about Harlem Renaissance rivalries as I am about [the rapper] Kash Doll. I like them to all play together, and I don’t mind that there are jokes some people won’t get. I’ve always loved having that experience as a television viewer, as being a bit of a voyeur.
What do you want viewers to understand about Detroit?
The season is about a treasure hunt, but what we are really hunting is all these little treasures in the city. Detroit has such a rich history related to prohibition and slavery. There’s an authentic speakeasy downtown that the Purple Gang frequented, and [they] used the tunnels underneath during Prohibition. The Second Baptist Church is a real church; the Underground Railroad was there. These are little treasures, and I wanted people to experience them.
Your father and brother were respected Detroit politicians who also had legal troubles. How did growing up in this storied and controversial political family shape your storytelling?
My dad ran a lot of campaigns when I was growing up. We would go canvas and knock on people’s doors — I’ve seen a lot of Detroit beyond my neighborhood. In my family there’s also always been this idea of service, and as an artist, I’m servicing an audience and my actors.
Somebody just asked me on TikTok, “Did your brother being in jail influence you wanting to get a Black man out of jail?” I was definitely emotionally affected going in to visit him, and one of the things was seeing how many Black men were in there and their kids coming to visit. The over-incarceration in our community doesn’t just affect the wrongdoer. But we would also do our best to have a fantastic couple of hours with him. My husband would be like, “Why was that so much fun? Why were we laughing so much?” And I’m like, “Well, we’re in jail. What are we going to do?” That’s comedy and drama, because we would go and visit him and it was funny.
In one scene Diarra meets with a teenage girl who is about to leave for college and wants to have sex on her prom night, and Diarra encourages her to do it if she really wants to. Why was this important to show?
I think I’m talking to my younger self. Growing up, there was that push in Black communities to make sure Black girls achieved, advanced and were academically perfect. But I also want to make sure Black girls understand to lean into their joy, their pleasure, and not siphon off our sexuality, our curiosity, our adventurous sides.
What are your biggest priorities when you’re making “Diarra From Detroit”?
That we entertain the audience and lean into the romance. I love that I’m darker than a paper bag and that I’m over 40 and that I’m this character who is an object of desire of people played by Morris Chestnut and Method Man. A lot of women will get a kick out of that.
We wanted to make a summer season that felt like summer catnip. I loved summer as a kid; it was the ultimate feeling of freedom and joy. And the older you get, you get robbed of it sometimes. So there was a list of things that we wrote down — vacation, ice cream, summer camp on a farm — and we tried to infuse them into those stories in different and surprising ways. Hopefully somewhere along the way you smile because you’re feeling the excitement of summer.
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