Like Comedic Mysteries? ‘Diarra from Detroit’ Is Your Next Binge

At a time when networks are loudly hunting for the next “second-screen series” (meaning a show you watch while you scroll on your phone), “Diarra from Detroit” is a bracing blast from the not-so-distant past when TV wasn’t just background noise.

“For me, TV can be a really sacred time,” series creator/showrunner/star Diarra Kilpatrick told IndieWire. “TV watching time can be like a really sweet and sacred time. And so I did want to make something where each episode felt like a full meal. That was intentional from the very beginning. You know when you have half of a piece of key lime pie left in the refrigerator and all day, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to go home and eat the other half of that key lime pie with some peppermint tea’? It gets you through the day, you know? And I really like that about television, that you could have a whole little meal waiting for you at home every week.”

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“Diarra from Detroit” is more than just a full meal — the comedic mystery noir is a smorgasbord of delights, all filtered through the singular vision of its creator. Diarra Brickland has just moved back to Detroit in the midst of separating from her husband, and the only salve is the hunk she hit it off with on her first Tinder date. Problem is, he’s ghosted her. Diarra is not someone to sit idly by when she can be doing too much, so she sets out to track him down, realizing during her search that he might be the boy kidnapped 25 years ago who is now involved with some seriously shady characters. (The tied-up naked Russian hitman in the closet is her first clue.)

Kilpatrick previously tackled the genre with her cult-fave web series “American Koko,” but she wanted to return to it with an eye on reaching a broader audience. A chance conversation at a party led to “Diarra from Detroit.”

“I was at a party with a friend of mine, and his mother told me that she worked as a P.I. in Chicago,” Kilpatrick said. “And I knew her fairly well, and I thought she didn’t seem tough beyond being like a single mom kind of tough. But she didn’t seem like someone you would expect to be walking into a dangerous situation. I kind of did a double-take. She said that nobody really paid her any mind, you know, she was just a woman at a bar. I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something really interesting about just a regular everyday woman who has this as a side hustle.'”

Diarra is endearingly not quite an everyday woman, though. She’s able to assemble clues into a clear picture of what happened (what Kilpatrick called “Diarra visions”), and though her day job is as a teacher, she has a real knack for crime-solving. Well, mostly. One of the thrills of “Diarra from Detroit” is that Kilpatrick and the writers aren’t afraid of letting Diarra be egregiously wrong at personal cost, as when she literally bets it all on a hunch during a high-stakes poker game and loses.

The other great thrill is the almost tactile look of the show, all deep hues and moody lighting. This isn’t rain-slicked L.A. streets noir; this is Detroit winter noir, and the difference is invigorating. “We started with a lot of reference images,” Kilpatrick said. “And Chioke Nassor, who did such a beautiful job of directing the first two episodes, he had some of the same images [I did]. I love when that mind meld happens. I sort of knew it was him when he said we were talking about the date scene [in the first episode], and he referenced ‘Out of Sight.’ And I was like, ‘That’s exactly the vibe that I was thinking when I wrote it!’ He and Matt Edwards, our DP, what they came up with, particularly the visual language that opens up the pilot, that was really their brainchild.”

But the visual language gets some extra oomph from what we hear: Diarra’s mesmeric voiceover. If she can seem manic or single-minded in her interactions, the Diarra we hear narrating the series is a different person entirely. The voiceover gives the entire series the sense of a fable unfolding, with Diarra recounting her story without justification or explanation.

“[Chioke and I] wanted it to feel really intimate,” Kilpatrick said. “Like I was talking directly to the viewer. [During the recording sessions] I would love to hear myself, which is normally a no-no. Normally you don’t want to hear the sound of your voice, but I love to have that, to hear myself. Like I was recording an album, and I got to be Beyonce, which was probably the best part of it.”

As effective as the voiceover is, Kilpatrck was always careful not to allow the convention to dilute the story. This is the half-a-slice-of-key-lime-pie show, after all, and no one is going to over-explain in voiceover what viewers already know from paying attention. That’s just one of the many battles Kilpatrick had to take on in her various roles on the series, something she said she could only do because of one person.

“Miles Orion Feldsott. Period,” Kilpatrick said. “He was the most amazing partner and such a well-rounded producer. When we got into production and I was pulled in a million different directions, he made sure the ship never went off course.”

Working alongside one’s husband had its benefits. “I was really lucky that my husband was doing it with me because I could literally wake up in the morning and be like, ‘What if the Russian…'” Kilpatrick said. “And he’d be like, ‘OK, let me get a cup of coffee. Hold on. Hold on.’ So it was really all-consuming, and the fact that we could be rewriting episodes at two in the morning and talking about things over breakfast was incredibly helpful on the time schedule that we were on.”

And helpful for the type of show they worked on, as well. Kilpatrick and the writers took great pains to plot out the mystery in its entirety (no, there wasn’t a murder board with thumbtacks and yarn). “It was a lot of kicking the tires on every single story beat,” Kilpatrick said. “I really wanted the mystery to be a good mystery on its own, even if it was not a comedy, but also recognizing that the magic of the show was going to be the comedic human moments inside the investigation. And we tried to really honor that.”

New episodes of “Diarra from Detroit” air Thursdays on BET+.

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