SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from the Season 2 finale of “Diarra From Detroit” now streaming on Paramount+.
With the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger hanging in the balance and a presidential administration that is persistently hostile to diversity, Black-led series like Natasha Rothwell’s well-reviewed Hulu comedy “How to Die Alone,” Issa Rae’s HBO Max series, “Rap Sh*t” and even the NBC drama “Found” have all been given the ax. Black stories are rarely being greenlit on streamers and networks. Still, Paramount+’s “Diarra From Detroit,” a stellar blend of mystery, drama and romance, is shining high in its second season. Yet, the show’s endurance hasn’t been without its challenges. The series, which debuted in 2024 on BET+ to rave reviews, took a two-year hiatus before returning for its second season on Paramount+ this past July. (BET+ was shuttered last spring, with its programming being merged into Paramount+).
Created by star and executive producer Diarra Kilpatrick, this season, set amid a classic boiling-hot Detroit summer, finds Diarra trying to find her footing in her newfound relationship with Chris (Shannon Wallace), who is still reeling from his traumatic past. Without a summer school assignment, Diarra decides to use her free time to officially launch her P.I. business. However, being tasked with finding Chris’ uncle’s armoire (which actually turns out to be a desk) leads Diarra, Chris and the school teacher’s best friends Tea (Bryan Terell Clark) and Aja (Dominique Perry) into the underbelly of Detroit, chasing a treasure trove and evading some diabolical gangsters all while trying to iron out all of their personal drama and chaos in between.
“We love a gumbo; I love complexity,” Kilpatrick tells Variety. “It pisses me off when work that has a Black woman at the center of it doesn’t respect the audience. We’re not talking about good or bad. That’s a judgment that I’m not interested in. But do you respect the audience? Did you like this woman? I don’t want Black female work to be synonymous with low craftsmanship or low budgets or bad lighting. I want us to be honored. In the medium, in the space. It’s really dawning on me as people are asking me, how does it feel not to be a household name with a whole-ass show at a huge conglomerate where my show is being mentioned in the same breath as ‘Furious’ and ‘Lioness.’ Do you know how much those shows cost to produce? They have some of the biggest stars in the world in them. There was a moment when there was all this niche storytelling happening, and now I’m one of the last people standing.”
As “Diarra From Detroit” Season 2 comes to a close, Variety spoke with Kilpatrick about what it took to bring the second season to the small screen, why Black stories matter and her hopes for a possible Season 3.
Paramount+
Season 1 was very winter-coded. Did you always know that you wanted Season 2 to be set in the summer?
When we were shooting in the winter, I started thinking we should probably do a summer season. I think maybe John Chafin, who plays Danger, was like, “Can we move to the summer?” But that was always kind of the plan. I was hoping we would shoot in Detroit proper, and even as a Detroiter, I don’t really want to be in Detroit in the thick of winter. However, when I started writing the pilot, it was literally like the snow took over my body and wrote for me. I was like, “Snow is punishing the city streets.” I think the character was so sad and bereft [following her divorce from Swa, played by Morris Chestnut] that the weather forced itself into the story, externalizing her emotional place when she was really in the winter of her life. So I was very happy to go back to summer. I was also very happy when I saw the special effects budget for adding snow all the damn time. We had a budget cut, so summer felt much cheaper. No coats, no VFXing in snow. So there was that. But I do like the story to unfold in ways that feel like they make sense. I didn’t really know exactly where we would end up, but I knew we were going to come out of that season for her, and it felt fitting to do it in a literal sense as well.
Speaking of budget cuts, is that part of the reason why it took so long between the first and second season?
It took them a very long time to pull the trigger on whether they were going to bring the show back. I imagine that had to do with whether they wanted to make the financial commitment. They decided that it would come back, but on a lower budget than Season 1. That impacted where we shot; we moved to Atlanta. It impacted a lot of things, cutting down some regular cast, that kind of thing. Part of it was just the corporate tango of nobody wanting to pull that trigger until the new regime was in place and had given the blessing to do so. We didn’t go into the [writers’] room for a really long time, and then they picked up the room. Then we went into the room, and the room ended, and they still hadn’t picked up the show. So then we were in limbo, waiting.
In Season 2, “Diarra From Detroit” is still at its core an adventure and a mystery, but we also get a thread of romance. Diarra is being pulled between three men: Chris, Royce (Clifford “Method Man” Smith) and Danger. What was it like having a romantic element within the mystery-thriller adventure of it all, but also this thread of motherhood that Diarra is really pondering this entire time?
You really hit the nail on the head with the two things I love to play with in the show: the emotional truths of Black womanhood and the fantasy. We’re in a world now where it seems like nobody can agree on anything, but you know what we can agree on? Method Man is fine. John Chafin is fine. Morris Chestnut is still fine. So if we can’t come together over anything, let’s come together over that. Let’s give people a fantasy every week. I’ve said before, I’ll say it again, I love to see a Black woman at the center of a story, particularly one where she’s the object of desire. I think it’s healing not only for the audience, but it’s also expansive for everybody else to see that and to participate in Black womanhood and all of its glory. It’s a vibe. It’s a good time. Join the party. And I love that, because we hit so many emotional truths in the motherhood conversation; so many of my friends and I are struggling with that, talking about it or figuring it out. Because when we do that, it gives us the grace to go into some more far-fetched places, to go for some bigger laughs and bigger set pieces and to go into some of the fantasy, for the audience to go with us on the fantasy of being romanced by the finest of the fine, of wearing the best clothes, of running around solving a mystery in Detroit and still having your hair laid.
BET/Paramount+
You also weave this beautiful ribbon of history into the show. Audiences learn about bootlegging during Prohibition, the Underground Railroad and quilting and what that has meant for the Black community and the Black church specifically. Is “Diarra From Detroit” a political show?
I would say anytime you put a Black woman in the center of something, it is inherently political in a lot of ways, simply because we just haven’t seen it enough for it to be old hat. People put so much on it. That’s where the fun is. Maybe I’m just a Black nerd, but I have always loved watching movies like “National Treasure” and “The Da Vinci Code.” I love watching a piece of fiction and then going on Google later to be like, “Wait a minute, how much of this is true and how much of these gaps are filled in by the imagination of the writer?” I guess at the end of the day, I’m the daughter of the teacher. So one thing [my mom] did was really instill in me the joy of learning, history and facts. “Indiana Jones,” “National Treasure” — it’s like there are no Black women in these movies. At all. You struggle to find a Black woman who speaks; maybe she has two lines, rolls her neck and then moves on. I really wanted us to write in the very center of that genre. I think the facts give it legitimacy: it was well-researched and brought in some truths about the city. To me, we were kind of just following the genre playbook.
Despite budget cuts and a change in platform, you also had so many people show up for you as guest stars this season, from Nicco Annan to Lovie Simone, Bokeem Woodbine, Lil Rel Howery, Amber Riley, Phylicia Rashad, Morris Chestnut and countless others. What has that meant for you?
As a community, Black Hollywood has a soul. Rel came into my DMs and was like, “I love this show.” When I hit him like, “We’re going to make you an offer,” he was down; he was in. Colman [Domingo] has said publicly that he would work for scale, which I keep repeating. That’s a big deal. It can be scary, because we operate a lot like an independent film. The way we shoot the show, no one gets all kinds of takes. You have to come in, do your thing, hit it and quit it. So there can be a fear in asking really prominent actors to come into a space where we’re going to be moving really quickly. But everybody came ready to play, loving the show, loving their character, and were just down to come in and sprinkle their magic over it. So it does make me emotional, because I was going a thousand miles per hour in the middle of it, just trying to get it done.
Speaking of emotional, in the Season 2 finale, “A Cold Ass Wedding,” Diarra and Aja’s friendship breaks down. Why was that important to illustrate when their bond has been such a glue in the series?
I think Tea and Aja have been [Diarra’s] chosen family, and they’ve really been there for her even when her marriage was breaking down. But Diarra and Aja’s characters have been at real odds, and we’ve played it a lot for the comedy of it. Aja is the voice of reason, and Diarra pushes full throttle ahead. You can’t rob the audience of the inevitable, and it just felt like there was going to be an inevitable tension point between the two of them. Also, Dominique Perry is such a fantastic actress and so funny that I also wanted a chance to see her spread her dramatic wings a little bit there too. It felt inevitable that they’d reach a real impasse and that Aja would break. I don’t know that we know how to move through conflict as friends as well as we do in romantic relationships. So we just wanted to explore that, and we’ll see how their relationship is impacted, hopefully, if we get another season.
Paramount+
Speaking of another season, what has it been like to experience the show on Paramount+, which is a much bigger platform than BET+ was?
It’s exciting, in a word — and it’s also complicated. BET+ going away meant a lot of people lost their jobs, and you can imagine that was a lot of Black people because it was at BET+. So you have to hope those people really land on their feet. But, as it relates to the show, I felt really excited about more people having access to this story. I really want to entertain a massive audience, and I want to bring them the nuance and specificity of me, Detroit, my sense of humor, my humanity and my heart. So it does feel like such an opportunity to reach a wider audience. The question is whether that audience will tap in, because I love that the Black audience has been really vocal on Threads, has made their opinions known, and has come to bully me to make sure that Diarra picks the man they like and all of that. But I have also seen people be like, “Wait, how come Paramount+ hasn’t shown me this show?” The algorithms are different, and we are in the echo chamber of our own algorithm, so it takes a little more time for other people to be introduced to the show and to tap in.
What are your hopes about a potential Season 3?
Well, every season is a different mystery. Diarra will always have to deal with some consequences of the mess she stirred up, but I have some thoughts about what the new case would be, where they would go from here, and what the central mystery would be.
But the biggest mystery is her. She really struggles to investigate herself, even her own feelings. She loves distraction, like us all in this era of iPhones and whatever. It’s like the minute something uncomfortable happens, we’re all like, “Let me check my Instagram.” “TikTok time.” I think a lot of people will relate to that, but I do have some thoughts about what her next big internal question would be; we’ll have to see if we let any of that live. She also definitely answers the question Chris asked her at the very end.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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