Diarra Kilpatrick’s “Detroit Diary” is a fresh take on detectives

Diarra Kilpatrick recalls writing the Debra Messing procedural “The Mysteries of Laura” for NBC when she received feedback from the network that she desired to ask Messing’s character, an NYPD homicide detective, on a date.

“The network responded, ‘Do people hate her?’ The criminals are still at large. And I remember considering, “What? He has to have something for himself,” Kilpatrick said recently on Zoom.

There’s an upcoming date at the middle of a latest crime comedy series that Kilpatrick created and executive produced and stars on BET+ titled “Diarra of Detroit”.

Kilpatrick (“Perry Mason”) plays a teacher – also Diarra – who is going through a divorce and has returned to her childhood home. She meets a man on the dating app Tinder they usually spend the night together. When Diarra doesn’t hear from him anymore, her friends say she had a ghost, but she decides something have to be improper and starts investigating. This amateur detective activity gets Diarra into dangerous situations.

Ghosting, says Kilpatrick, “is something that happens to all my girls. They discuss it so easily. They say, “I talked to this guy after which he showed up. And then I used to be talking to this guy and it hit me. It’s an incredibly prolific act. I feel like nobody is really talking about what it says about us as a society, that we just don’t communicate with one another anymore.

Kenya Barris, the creator of such hits as “Black People” and “Adults”, is also the chief producer of the series. Barris is a partner at BET Studios, and “Diarra from Detroit” is her first scripted series.

Kilpatrick recalls first meeting Barris on the 2017 NAACP Awards, where he told her he had read one in all her scripts.

“That was a big moment for me because I thought, ‘How the hell would you even have time to read my script?’” Kilpatrick recalled. “It took many years for it to turn into anything, but it was just kind of that Black Hollywood ‘how are you’ thing that turned into something amazing.”

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Like her TV character, Kilpatrick is from Detroit and her name is familiar. Kilpatrick’s father is Bernard Kilpatrick, and her half-brother is disgraced by former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted in 2013 on corruption charges. He served greater than seven of the 28 years of his sentence and received a pardon from President Trump in 2021. The elder Fitzpatrick, who has worked on political campaigns including his son’s mayoral bid and former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s 2002 campaign, was also convicted in 2013 of tax fraud and spent 10 months in prison.

Kilpatrick says she knows there might be questions on her family now that she’s within the highlight.

“I’m prepared for it,” she said. “I realize that in order to strengthen my voice, I also need to strengthen my face. And that will come with the territory.”

Kilpatrick credits spending time along with her dad growing up for helping her study Detroit’s different neighborhoods and appreciate its people.

“I say I’m from throughout Detroit because often on the weekends my dad can be campaigning or something and I’d be on the campaign office with him or I’d go canvassing and pass out literature around the world asking people to vote for this or that person. So I saw a lot of the town and had a really warm perspective about it.”