Diarra Kilpatrick’s BET+ Show ‘Diarra From Detroit’ Defies Expectations

But you’d never know any of this from the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of “Diarra From Detroit” in June 2023. Folks lined up behind the velvet ropes to get into the jam-packed SVA Theater in Manhattan for the debut of the latest from Diarra Kilpatrick, known previously for her criminally underrated 2017 satirical series “American Koko.”

“Diarra From Detroit” is a hysterical dark comedy about a soon-to-be divorced schoolteacher (Kilpatrick) whose Tinder date turns her so far out that when he up and disappears she leaps down a rabbit hole and into Detroit’s criminal underbelly to find him. Shenanigans, obviously, ensue.

Though at its festival premiere you could hear cackling down every aisle, there was nary a word about the series again until it premiered on BET+ in March of this year.

“Yeah, it took a second,” Kilpatrick agreed while on a video call with me from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Just to do anything from that platform is really tough.”

That’s mostly due to BET+’s marketing constraints, she said. While the acclaim eventually began trickling in, fans still lamented how little the show had been publicized.

“I’ve seen on Twitter people being like, ‘this show hasn’t been promoted enough,’” Kilpatrick said. Had the series not been as embraced as it was out of Tribeca — “more than people were expecting” she added — BET+ might not have been able to find more resources to promote it.

“They actually did promote the show more than they normally would,” Kilpatrick continued. “Do we have HBO’s marketing budget? We did not, nor does the platform have that thing where people are going, ‘What are they doing? What’s coming up next?’”

“Diarra from Detroit” developed an audience, including critics and award pundits. But one social media comment, Kilpatrick said sarcastically, is her “favorite” bit of praise: “This show on BET+ is actually good.”

I can’t help but titter when she tells me this, because I know what she’s about to say next. And I feel the same way.

“It’s the ‘actually’ for me,” she continued, genuinely surprised. “And I will ask people, “Why ‘actually’?”

Kilpatrick recalled this with a smile while seated inside her sunny kitchen over 2,000 miles away from her native Detroit. Her radiant, chocolate brown skin was complemented by a white tank top and braids that cascaded down her back. Months have passed since the Season 1 cliffhanger finale of “Diarra From Detroit” aired, and she’s been working on Season 2; in addition to playing the show’s titular character, she’s a writer and producer.

Kilpatrick seemed happy as she reflected on the complexities of her most recent success. Still, she’s been taking some me time, which she admits is unusual for her. “I actually just gave myself permission — literally just a couple weeks ago, though — to enjoy the summer,” she told me. “And that has been really nice.”

Kilpatrick has earned the time off, especially as a working mother of 2-year-old son, Woodson, who she shares with husband and frequent creative partner Miles Orion Feldsott. It’s given her a little more time to revisit some of her favorite shows, like “House of Cards” and “Sex and the City.”

“It’s my comfort television show,” she said of the latter. “I watch it before I move, before I have to write something. I watch it when I don’t feel good. Maybe ’cause it reminds me of being young in New York and the friendships that I made during that time.”

It’s rare these days that Kilpatrick can kick up her feet and watch, say, Whoopi Goldberg and Eddie Murphy movies or countless episodes of “Law & Order: SVU.” That’s partly because of motherhood.

“You really do sacrifice those days where you just watch television or watch movies all day and unapologetically don’t take a shower and don’t get out of your pajamas,” Kilpatrick said. “Can’t do that unless you commit to [watching] the Disney Channel, which is hard for me.”

But there’s another reason why she struggles to carve some downtime into her life, and why that “actually” comment sticks out so much to her, amid the heaps of praise “Diarra From Detroit” has received.

“The thing that I’m always trying to recover from is being a Black girl raised with [the idea that] you have to be twice as good to get half as much,” Kilpatrick told me. “That is oppressive to me. But you also realize the truth of that sometimes.”

Because Black folks often work so hard just for our efforts to get even a little bit noticed, especially by the majority-white leaders of the Hollywood establishment.

The BET+ of it all further complicates that. But it’s not like “Diarra From Detroit” is the only great thing the streamer has going. To that, Kilpatrick immediately points to Loretta Devine’s performance on the drama series “Being Mary Jane.”

“She plays this masculine-presenting lesbian con artist who is so good and so fantastic,” Kilpatrick said excitedly. “And if that performance had been on ABC at that time, she might have won an Emmy.”

I think her work on Starz’s “P-Valley” also justifies what Kilpatrick said about her award chances.

“A similar stigma,” Kilpatrick said, referring to the way Starz’s many Black shows, like “P-Valley” and the wildly popular “Power II: Ghost,” are overlooked by awards committees.

It raises the question of how “Diarra From Detroit” landed at BET+. As Kilpatrick describes, a lot of thought went into that decision.

Early in the process of pitching “Diarra From Detroit,” she said, she knew she had something great. BET+ offered her a script-to-series deal almost as soon as the streamer received her pitch — meaning that if executives liked the pilot script, they’d order the entire series. As amazing as that offer was, Kilpatrick didn’t jump on it right away.

“It wasn’t like, ‘OK, let’s just do that,’” she recalls of her thinking, even though she was told that bigger names with longer track records were also offered this same kind of deal.

“I was a little bit blown away by that,” she admitted. “And again, you get the Black woman thing where I’m used to fighting for every fucking crumb of whatever I get. I was like, ‘No, we’re about to pitch eight different people over Zoom.’”

Ah, yes. That familiar over-preparedness for a struggle. So she did what many Black women do when evaluating potentially life-changing decisions: She looped in her girlfriends.

Kilpatrick rang up an astrologer friend that she’s known since college. And she called a friend whose work centers on building cities and infrastructure and could help her decipher Black corporate-speak. (It’s a whole thing.)

But it was Erynn Sampson, head of development at Kenya Barris’ Khalabo Ink Society — the production company behind “Diarra From Detroit” — who ultimately helped her pull the trigger.

“She was like, ‘We should take the win,’” Kilpatrick recalled.

That’s not just because the offer was something. As Kilpatrick notes, when the industry was trying to crawl out of the pandemic, execs were leaving their jobs while in the middle of developing shows, and high-profit platforms like Netflix were dropping series left and right.

It was because BET+ was where her work felt most appreciated.

“What came through was, I should go where the love is,” Kilpatrick said.

She learned that it takes a lot for a cultural phenomenon, like AMC’s “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” to invigorate a network, “where one show redefines something and brings in an audience that wouldn’t otherwise come to that place,” Kilpatrick said.

“I guess I try to be like a trailblazer. The idea of BET making premium content seemed like something that I would want to be a part of.”

“Trailblazer” perfectly encapsulates the impact Kilpatrick and her show have had on the network. BET seemed to also have boosted its Emmy campaign this year more than ever, in an effort to catapult some of its shows, including “Diarra From Detroit,” into the awards conversation.

While the series unjustly didn’t receive a nomination, the fact that audiences and press across the racial spectrum are excited about it says a lot. It hasn’t exactly turned Kilpatrick into a celebrity, but the show certainly has gained fans. That’s what most excites her.

“I had on a ‘Diarra From Detroit’ sweatshirt at the supermarket and an older white lady came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, such a good show,’” Kilpatrick said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And she was like, ‘mhmm,’ and then turned and walked away.”

Celebrity isn’t something Kilpatrick has been pursuing anyway; that might have been why she did theater for so long, she said. Plus, she got a good sense of what being a celebrity is like when her half brother, Kwame, was the Democratic mayor of Detroit from 2002 to 2008. In 2013, he was convicted of 24 counts of racketeering, mail fraud and other offenses committed during his time in office, for which he was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison. After serving six years, he received a pardon from former President Donald Trump.

“I remember thinking that being famous is great on your best day, but not that great on your worst day,” Kilpatrick said. “What I’ve realized is I won’t be perfect at it, and that’ll be fine. I’ll just have to take it sort of one day at a time.”

But an interesting thing happens when a Black series expands beyond the Black market — not everyone will fully understand or appreciate the nuances of the storytelling. And “Diarra From Detroit” is doing a whole lot in masterfully subtle ways.

For starters, the show follows a Black female civilian who teams up with a few old friends to do the work of an entire major city’s police department to rescue a Black man. And amid the stress of divorce and seeing gangsters shot right in front of her, she can’t even take a real-deal trauma shower because her hair will get wet.

Kilpatrick is totally fine with the fact that not every joke will land with every audience member. “Or it might be a chuckle to one person, but a different kind of laughter — like, a laughter of recognition — to another,” she explained.

That’s what pulls her, as an audience member, into shows and films, she said.

“I like specialized worlds, rare worlds,” Kilpatrick added. “With a Woody Allen movie, you might laugh at something because it’s kind of funny. Not because you heard your grandmother say the exact thing. You live that life. Now I’m gonna watch your Cliff Notes on it. I don’t have to live it.”

“Diarra From Detroit” doesn’t seem to cater to anyone’s expectations. Kilpatrick has created a Black-led series free of the weight of being a Black show. The show exists on its own plane.

And while Kilpatrick recognizes that, as a Black woman, everything she makes is political, she felt a sense of freedom in giving herself permission to create this specific world.

“As a conscious person, I don’t want to just throw something into the world that I think is harmful,” she explained. “But at the same time, I did want to liberate myself from, like, This is the Black story that’s going to fit into this box. And try to just have fun and tell the story.”

That meant depicting what she describes as the “quirkiness” of the hood and including characteristics you don’t typically see highlighted on TV. She drew from her own experiences growing up in Motor City.

“I went to a school that was for Black nerds,” Kilpatrick said. “And everybody was smart. You could get your ass kicked in academic games and you could just get your ass kicked.”

She also spent a lot of time weaving in the perhaps harder-to-swallow realities of the way a character from there might say or do something.

“A lot of times I would have to fight for the characters saying things that aren’t that great,” Kilpatrick told me. “They are using the N-word. I mean, there was a really big back-and-forth about the use of the word ‘Arab’ in the show.”

“I did want to just kind of create and not judge the characters; just let them be and go on this journey without having the weight of, like, the Black rules,” she added.

I can understand that. I’m fully aware that even asking Kilpatrick about, say, the responsibility she feels as a Black creative to represent the realities of the community only bolsters the idea that there could be only one way to do that.

But the point is that there’s not. And Black creatives shouldn’t be the only ones having to think about this responsibility.

“I do sometimes feel jealous of Marta Kauffman, who [co-]created ‘Friends,’” Kilpatrick said. “They never had ‘a very special episode’ about somebody being pulled over by the police.”

“How did you never have to deal with the tougher realities of the country that we live in?” Kilpatrick added. “And so of course it’s going to be a part of it because they’re Black people. But I did not want the show to ever feel like ‘a very special episode’ of anything.”

The character Diarra, partly inspired by the many hours of “Murder, She Wrote” Kilpatrick watched with her grandmother growing up, gets herself into one dangerous situation after the next — and all over a guy she barely knew. She’s spiraling after being served divorce papers, but still, these aren’t considered to be the typical antics of a Black woman.

“We talked about this in the [writers’] room all the time,” Kilpatrick told me. “It’s like, you wanna see a Black woman and Black friends be in this kind of story. But, we kept having to justify or at least acknowledge the fact that Black women don’t do this like this.”

“There is a tiny bit of you having to suspend your disbelief because if your girlfriend was like, ‘Come on, girl, let’s solve this case,’ chances are it’s your girlfriend that grew up in the O.C.,” she said.

“What’s so fun about it is trying to figure out how to put this woman in Jessica Fletcher’s shoes when we can accept that kind of meddling from a white woman,” Kilpatrick said, noting her character’s “Karen-esque thing of ‘I demand answers.’”

Part of how the show contends with that is through Diarra’s voiceover. It’s a way for the character to directly engage with what the audience is likely already thinking — because Kilpatrick knows that going down strange dark hallways is not something that has ever really ended well for Black women on screen.

The show is in on all of it.

Even while Kilpatrick gets her thrills from venturing into heightened fictional worlds, she’s stayed attuned to the urgent, real-life political landscape.

She was among 40,000 Black women who jumped on a Zoom call this summer to mobilize for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. I brought up the Instagram post she’d made following the call.

“I did have to stop comments on that particular post because people were coming back really aggressive with some hatred and some things that got out of bounds,” Kilpatrick told me.

That was unusual for her, because engaging with people about politics — in particular, Project 2025, which is “really terrifying to me,” she said — is something she’s been doing since before she was even out of grade school.

“At the dinner table, at the brunch table, with my friends, my husband and I — when we take our walks and try to solve all the problems in the world,” she continued. “It’s so natural. I would have to remember not to talk about politics.”

Her mother ignited that flame in her. Raised an only child to a single mother, Kilpatrick became her mom’s “companion,” as she described it. As a 5-year-old, she’d accompany her mom to night classes after she decided to return to college.

The pair went to poetry readings together and took countless trips to the library, where Kilpatrick’s mom would often work on projects with her classmates.

“I really got in the habit of sitting down and being well behaved,” she remembered. “And I think that is what took me into my imagination.”

The social and political power of storytelling all came together for her at a very early age. Her mom was “constantly talking about NPR and politics and politicians,” Kilpatrick said. She knew about members of Congress, and about candidates for office and their policies ― which meant so did her daughter.

“So, it’s part of who I am,” Kilpatrick said. “And that’s one thing — even when I went on ‘The Breakfast Club’ and they blasted me for having a white husband, I was like, ‘I’m fine.’”

She respects her audience enough to be honest with them.

“Because as someone who raised my hand to say, ‘I want to tell stories,’ I think part of the deal, to some degree, is I’m going to be a bit transparent about who I am,” she continued. “That it’s OK for you to see who your stories are coming from, even if you don’t agree with me.”