Diarra Kilpatrick Says Season 2 of “Diarra From Detroit” Ends on a Question: “She’s Always Going to Sort of Jump Into Another Case”

The Season 2 finale of “Diarra From Detroit” solves its case. It does not solve its detective.

That was the design, series creator and star Diarra Kilpatrick said in an exclusive interview with Where Is The Buzz, where she discussed the finale, the fate of the Chief, the show’s journey across three platforms, and the real Detroit history threaded through the season’s treasure hunt.

Asked whether the finale forces her character to finally sit with herself, or whether the mystery format functions as an escape hatch that always supplies somewhere else to look, Kilpatrick said the answer is closer to the latter.

“What we’ve learned is the lengths that she will go to not to sit with herself,” she said. “And so the end of this season, you kind of find out, the season ends on a question.”

“The cases will always be solved. She’s going to, she will walk into any situation to solve the case. So the case will be solved, but the case of herself, I think that’s the one that will always take the most amount of work, in truth,” Kilpatrick said. “And I don’t know that she’s totally ready to really look at herself and pull that stuff apart. So she’s always going to sort of jump into another case in order to not sit with herself.”

Kilpatrick said the season does not close the book on the Chief, played by Harry Lennix, whom she called one of her favorite actors. She offered a spoiler about material added to the finale.

“We actually shot a [scene and] put it into the episode, because I think we just haven’t had a chance to play enough,” she said. “And I think if Diarra is Sherlock, then there’s some Moriarty energy to that character, and we think that that’s her kind of big bad that she’ll have to contend with for a while. So that is not completely closed out.”

The series has moved through an unusual amount of corporate turbulence: a 2023 festival debut, a 2024 BET+ premiere, a wait for renewal, and roughly another year before Season 2 arrived, followed by a shift to Paramount+. Asked whether she was building an ending that could work as a series finale if it had to, Kilpatrick said she was not writing defensively.

“Well, that was a h*ll of a question. And there’s so many parts to it,” she said.

“I am an optimist. I was not writing defensively. I was writing like maybe this show will go forever, even though I’d be so tired. I would always say that, but from a slightly more well-rested place.”

Instead, she said, the finale was conceived as a debut.

“No, we were really writing; this is kind of like a coming out. The last image of her is, you know, the season starts with her denying people who want her to take on her case, and she’s saying, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about this.’ She’s telling half-truths about how responsible she actually was for bringing Deontay home,” Kilpatrick said. “By the end, she’s putting a flyer up with her number on it and putting Dunk’s desk down in her home.”

The visual grammar of the final scene was deliberate.

“That pebbled glass that’s on the front of her door was intentionally hearkening back to the door of a detective’s office, that this is really her saying, ‘I’m entering my PI era very consciously,'” she said. “And so therefore, like Easy Rawlins before her or Angela Lansbury or whomever, there are many, many cases that she can tackle from now on. So no, we were just like, let’s ride till the wheels fall off.”

Kilpatrick was candid about the economics facing a show led by someone without a large existing following.

“The truth of the matter is, it is a corporate entity. They are looking for these big shows,” she said. “And I do feel, as someone who has been blessed to have this opportunity to write and create a show, I do feel the pressure as not being a household name from the jump.”

“It used to be there was all this money devoted to marketing. Media was really more consolidated. You could show up on Oprah one day and the next day the whole fr**king world knew that you existed,” she said. “And now it is a much bigger commitment, and it requires strategy in order to introduce new shows, new stars, new things to the world. It just takes time.”

“And as somebody who doesn’t have 10 million social media followers and all that, it is harder to get a show off the ground. When you’re competing with like Zoe Saldana starring in all the biggest grossing movies or whatever, her trailer is going to go out to so many more people,” she said. “So I do think that within these conglomerates there is a greater risk for smaller, more niche voices to find their way through and find their audience.”

She credited the show’s survival to word of mouth and to smaller outlets.

“Niche press, keep putting the show’s name in their mouths. Keep educating people about us. And the people who tell their friends and harass their coworkers to watch the show, because we are like this little engine that could,” Kilpatrick said. “And I do hear our fan base being so opinionated and riding so hard and asking for merch and all this. They’re like, ‘Sign me up for the ghettoies.'”

She said the show may represent the close of a chapter in television.

“So I think we really are the end of an era in that respect, because there was a moment where it felt like there were all these little shows made by people you hadn’t heard of, and that’s not happening so much,” she said. “They’d rather put Nicole Kidman in 10 different shows than give someone who doesn’t necessarily have a following this kind of opportunity.”

“So I appreciate that. I don’t remember the rest of the question. It was so involved,” she added. “I hope I answered it.”

Kilpatrick said the move to a larger platform has changed how she thinks about the audience, and she reached for an unexpected comparison.

“I know it’s controversial, but I’m a big Woody Allen fan. Sometimes it is so niche and such a rarefied world that I don’t even understand what the h*ll is happening all the time. But for me, it’s an enriching experience to watch it,” she said. “I feel the same way about this show. I think there’s so many access points for such a broad audience, and I do hope that they tap in.”

“I think the reality is we sometimes get in smaller and smaller niches, and we get in echo chambers of our algorithm. And one of the beautiful things is like our showrunner hopped on Threads and was like, are white people tapping into this show? Not because we’re courting the white gaze or whatever, but just because the reality of it is we’re on a bigger platform,” she said. “We want to perform well, and we want black stories to travel the world because we think that it breeds empathy.”

“And a lot of white people were like, ‘I have Paramount, and I still haven’t heard of this show, or Paramount hasn’t shown me this show, or my friends aren’t talking about this show,'” she said.

“So we really do hope that sort of in a grassroots way, and not just black or white, because sometimes I think that’s the crux of our race problem, is that we think so opposite and it’s really just like across all demographics,” Kilpatrick said. “We hope that people talk about the show and talk it up with their friends and recommend us for a weekend binge, because we think it’s such a fun weekend binge.”

“People have access to the show. We hope that the conversation continues so that they can tap in in a real, real way.”

Season 2 sends its heroine after a treasure hunt built on clues left by prohibitionist Duncan Duckett before he was gunned down in his own speakeasy, and threads real Detroit and abolitionist history through the fiction. Kilpatrick said the research and the invention were always meant to work together.

“Well, I’m a black nerd, so I love facts. I love facts. I love historical facts. Oh my god, do I love history,” she said. “And I also love my imagination. I love bridging the gaps between the stories that the facts can’t tell you with my imagination. So that was always going to be threaded through in a way that was done with real care and respect.”

The payoff, she said, is a natural resource rather than a pile of money.

“So the treasure is a real thing, and it’s a natural resource, and we were talking about that a lot in the room, that people talk about Detroit potentially becoming like the new center of the country in the coming years because there’s so much water,” Kilpatrick said. “And those are some of the things that we have taken for granted: that water will always be there. Water will always be free. Water will always be accessible. And that’s a conversation that we’re having now, is that it is a gold in a sense.”

“As much as gold has increased in its value since the 30s, so has water, so has clean air. So has things that we just always thought would be, you know, public schooling, health care, like all these things that feel like they should be ours, feel like we should have rights to, are up for debate,” she said. “And so we were just fascinated by that, and fascinated by the entities that might come together in order to protect or to own a natural resource like that in late-stage capitalism.”

The season’s larger argument, Kilpatrick said, is about what black families actually inherit.

“And in inheriting treasures from our ancestors that might not be trust funds, there’s something about the basics that they taught us, the basics of making bone broth, the things that held our community down for a long time,” she said. “And so just getting back to the basics that they taught us and that they gave us and that they preserved for us might be our saving grace, sort of, after all.”

“So we thought that was really fitting, that what Dunc had saved for his sons was just water,” Kilpatrick said. “Seems simple, but can’t live without it, you know.”