TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. "Diarra From Detroit" is a Paramount+ series that stars Diarra Kilpatrick as a Motor City school teacher who keeps getting herself and her friends involved in mysteries. Now in its second season, the show is a favorite of our critic at large, John Powers. He says the show uses free-wheeling comedy to take us places we haven't been before.
JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Because so much of television takes place in generic locations, I've always loved shows that are rooted somewhere real, especially if that somewhere is a place we rarely see - the Baltimore of "The Wire," the Tulsa of "The Lowdown," the Albuquerque of "Breaking Bad" and "Pluribus," the small town Minnesota and North Dakota of "Fargo." Such shows have a richness of texture and feeling that you get when a story isn't merely set someplace, but seems to grow from its very soil.
Few shows announce their roots more clearly than "Diarra From Detroit," the smart, deliriously ambitious comic mystery series that's currently in its second season on Paramount+. Created by its star Diarra Kilpatrick, a Detroit native, the show is at once a mystery, a romcom, a vision of women's power, a portrait of Black Detroit and a cornucopia of good jokes. No show on TV makes me laugh out loud nearly so often.
Kilpatrick plays Diarra Brickland, a hardworking, underpaid Detroit school teacher whose slick lawyer of a husband is divorcing her. Season one followed Diarra's search for a hunk named Chris - that's Shannon Wallace - whom she thought ghosted her after a torrid and soulful one night stand. Working with a Scooby Doo band of friends, she eventually finds Chris and rescues him from abduction, but not before traveling through the Motor City underbelly, with its missing children, strip clubs and criminal gangs.
As season two begins, Diarra is discovering that maybe Chris isn't the man for her after all. To distract herself during summer vacation, she channels her inner Nancy Drew and agrees to find a pushy old geezer's stolen armoire. It's actually a desk. Before she knows it, she and a slightly different band of friends are faced with shootings, threats from the cops, an insanely thuggish street gang and a treasure map from Prohibition days. And in the midst of all this, Diarra finds herself roiled by the sound of her biological clock tick, tick, ticking. That sound gets louder when she bumps into an arrogant old boyfriend in a diner, niftily played by Method Man of Wu Tang Clan fame. He pitches a clumsy bit of woo (ph).
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METHOD MAN: (As Royce) We should try again, for real this time.
DIARRA KILPATRICK: (As Diarra Brickland, laughing).
METHOD MAN: (As Royce) Hear me out. If it gets romantic again, that's a plus. Or we can get modern - coparent. You can use my sperm. I mean, your ass ain't getting any younger.
KILPATRICK: (As Diarra Brickland) Wow. Royce, I will actually stab you in the throat.
METHOD MAN: (As Royce) The egg reserves go down every six months after 35.
KILPATRICK: (As Diarra Brickland) Why do you even know that?
METHOD MAN: (As Royce) Old ladies have old babies.
KILPATRICK: (As Diarra Brickland) Shut up.
METHOD MAN: (As Royce) If you wait too long...
KILPATRICK: (As Diarra Brickland) You don't know. What are you talking about?
METHOD MAN: (As Royce) Baby, if you wait too long, you will give birth to Morgan Freeman.
POWERS: At school, Diarra is so gung-ho that her fellow teachers derisively call her Captain Extra. I'm inclined to put that name on Kilpatrick herself, as a compliment. Not only does she create a Black heroine unlike any I've seen on TV, she surrounds her with extraness - scads of characters, locations, twists, songs, pop culture gags and sex. At its best, "Diarra From Detroit" has some of the liberating, gleefully obscene craziness of an early Almodovar film. What makes it great isn't its serviceable mystery plot but the fun stuff fizzing around it, like Diarra and her friends cracking jokes about Martin Luther King's womanizing. While Diarra drives the action with her likable energy, every episode brims with entertaining people. This starts with Diarra's friends, like her wry colleague Mr. Tea - that's Bryan Terrell Clark - a gay teacher who shuns romantic commitment, and the perky businesswoman Aja - that's DomiNque Perry - who preaches celibacy until she meets a star football player.
From Diarra's flamboyantly earthy cousin Raqueeba to the Tubi (ph) movie director called Film School to the respected, socially conscious Black business leader who's actually a crook, "Diarra From Detroit" offers a vision of African American culture's sheer abundance and complexity, which means that for all its humor, the series also has darker currents. There's a section of town so scary that Diarra and her friends won't enter, a police department that Black people know better than to trust, drug-dealing white supremacists clearly up to no good. The show's most haunting character is Diarra's longtime friend Danger, beautifully played by Jon Chaffin, who was forced into crime as a child and would like to straighten his life out but keeps facing obstacles not of his own making. If Diarra is the upbeat heart of the show, Danger is its wounded, struggling soul.
Now, it might be a bit much to say that Kilpatrick, whose half-brother Kwame was once mayor of Detroit, has served up a love letter to her hometown, but the show clearly aims to rebut the widespread image of the city as a sad metropolis with a dying auto industry, sports teams that never win and a Black underclass so downtrodden that its most famous rapper is a white guy. Diarra's Detroit is not a lost cause - far from it. Like the Harlem in Colson Whitehead's wonderful, just-finished trilogy of novels, it celebrates a resilient, churning vitality that America rarely gets to see.
MOSLEY: John Powers reviewed "Diarra From Detroit," now in its second season.
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, national security writer Joby Warrick tells the story of Carlos the Jackal, the world's most notorious terrorist in the '70s and '80s. He became so famous for his brazen attacks and playboy lifestyle that once, when he was releasing hostages from a hijacked plane, several asked him for autographs. I hope you can join us.
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MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "BLUES FOR LOS ANGELES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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