How do teachers spend summer break? Diarra Brickland, the titular character of “Diarra From Detroit,” is getting deeper into the world of professional private investigation and somehow found herself pulled into a furniture-recovery mission that spiraled into a triple homicide case. It was a long wait, but two years after its debut season, the comedy-mystery series is back to subvert the traditional whodunnit crime-solving genre with its smooth blend of internet-ready humor and an earnest tone of classic detective shows. And despite trying to leave behind the Nancy Drew persona she adopted last season — after a Tinder date fiasco sent her down a dangerous rabbit hole — our favorite seventh-grade teacher-turned-accidental investigator has been pulled into another round of sleuthing hijinks that disrupt plans for a restful recess. It’s another wild ride packed with laugh-out-loud one-liners. You are reading Screen Gab newsletter Sign up to get recommendations for the TV shows and streaming movies you can’t miss, plus exclusive interviews with the talent behind your favorite titles, in your inbox every Friday By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads. The eight-episode second season premiered on Paramount+, which took over the show’s former home, BET+, late last month, with new episodes of dropping weekly on Wednesdays through Sept. 9. Times’ TV critic Robert Lloyd said the new season “feels even more self-assured” and credited the small details for keeping its characters “surprising and lifelike” when he made it his streaming pick in last week’s newsletter. In this week’s Guest Spot, creator and star Diarra Kilpatrick tells us how a simple purchase made on a homesick-fueled side quest during a trip to Thailand eventually became the inspiration for Season 2’s treasure hunt premise. Before you get to that, our writers have some weekend viewing recommendations that will either make you wish you were a member of a foul-mouthed group of feral British street cats (animated, of course) or have you ready to set out on a sun-drenched excursion through the American Southwest. And a programming note before I pivot back to watching TikTok parodies of the recent NSFW blunder on QVC: The Envelope podcast is back with new episodes in the lead up to the 78th Emmy Awards, which will take place Sept. 14. If you’re a fan of “The Pitt,” be sure to check out my conversation with Noah Wyle. Next week’s guest is rising star Chase Infiniti of “The Testaments.” — Yvonne Villarreal Turn onRecommendations from the film and TV experts at The Times A scene from Netflix’s “Alley Cats.” (Netflix) “Alley Cats” (Netflix)Animal lover, human distruster Ricky Gervais has assembled a peripatetic hangout comedy about a pack of feral feline philosophers, better and worse informed about the workings of the world, for a kind of laconic suburban British “Top Cat,” as the pack, with a couple of domestic associates, wanders the town before settling down in an abandoned apartment for the night. The animation, which has a 1970s look, is serviceable but doesn’t need to be anything more; it’s the talk — often vulgar and profane, and delivered with improvisational rhythms — that makes the cartoon run. Occasionally violent, in a fleeting way, or perhaps just clear-eyed about life and death (“Life’s cruel,” someone says, “but you gotta stand on your own four feet”), it’s ultimately sentimental, with something of a long arc involving the attempt to help a lost kitten get home. (James Taylor shows up on the soundtrack.) Diane “Cunk” Watson is among the voice cast, with Gervais as Gus, the softhearted indisputable leader of the gang. — R.L. Benicio Del Toro, left, as Dr. Gonzo and Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke, in Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” (Peter Mountain / Universal Pictures) “Desert Trips” (Criterion Channel)Maybe I’ve become an L.A. cliché (too soon), but driving to Joshua Tree, the highways emptying out and the landscape turning into something from a Mars movie, has emerged as a near-metaphysical experience for me. What if you can’t get away this month? Criterion’s got you covered with a quartet of quasi-spiritual road films, all of which capture the tension between blistering heat and psychological purification. The best of them is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 “Zabriskie Point,” a major influence on the recent “Sirāt” — feel free to ignore some of its spacey dialogue (never this filmmaker’s strong suit) and drink in the vistas. David Lynch’s sexy “Wild at Heart” leans more heavily into the inhospitable side of things, as does “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” from an era when Johnny Depp surprised us with every turn. Save “Paris, Texas” for last: a lovely evocation of family drift and far and away Wim Wenders’ finest dose of purgatorial drama. — Joshua RothkopfGuest spotA weekly chat with actors, writers, directors and more about what they’re working on — and what they’re watching Diarra Kilpatrick as Diarra Brickland and Shannon Wallace as Chris in Season 2 of “Diarra From Detroit.” (BET / Paramount+) Everyone has first-date horror stories. But Diarra Brickland can’t seem to escape hers. In “Diarra From Detroit,” a first date turned into a whodunnit that won’t stop. When the recently divorced public school teacher, played by Diarra Kilpatrick (who also created the show), is seemingly ghosted after a good first date with a Tinder match, it sends her on a spiral for answers that tangles her up in a decades-old kidnapping conspiracy. It turns out, her date Chris (Shannon Wallace) wasn’t ghosting Diarra; he was kidnapped by a criminal underworld, and she discovers he is the adult version of a child who was abducted in the ‘90s. With her amateur sleuthing skills, Diarra rescues him at the end of Season 1. The new season picks up with Diarra uncertain about a future with Chris and determined to break things off. But with school out and Chris jobless, they’ve been enlisted by her landlord to track down a stolen antique furniture piece — her first paid P.I. job. Of course, it’s anything but a simple case. It spirals into a triple homicide investigation and a citywide treasure hunt, with Diarra once again sucked into a truth-finding mission. For Kilpatrick, who grew up in Detroit watching murder mystery shows like “Matlock” and “Columbo” with her grandmother, “Diarra From Detroit” was a chance to let a Black woman drive the narrative and be the hero. I caught up with her recently over a video call to discuss the new season. — Y.V.Were you nervous about this gap between seasons? I was nervous because we were picking up some momentum. I had people telling me that had seen the show two and three times. I would be out in public, and people would be like, “What’s going on? You need to get out of here. Leave this dinner, and go home and write.” The fans were very pushy, but I was nervous that that was going to be a really small group of people. It was really motivating, though. I was trying to make something that really grabbed people, that felt fresh, that felt like they hadn’t quite seen these combination of ingredients this way before. I really wanted to service the people who watched the show when it initially came out and have been patiently waiting for us to return, but also rewatching the show in the interim.It’s so fun seeing how the audience engages with the series. Why do you think it struck such a chord with viewers?That’s my intention — I want to create work that builds community. Somebody just said they’re starting a TV club where they’re going to break down the episodes on Sunday, and I’m just excited to pop in and say hello to those guys. It really is my secret wish that people have something to build community around and to talk about, and for it to be a catalyst to have larger discussions, or even just to hang out with their friends and family. It just hits a lot of points. It’s for all the Black girl nerds like me — or all the nerds, period — who love to to curl up in bed with a good Nancy Drew book. This is something that really brings mystery and makes it relatable, makes it fun, makes it really current. And I just think it’s fun to combine these sort of genre elements that we’ve seen before with characters, having them collide with characters who maybe we haven’t seen in these worlds before. Diarra Kilpatrick as Diarra Brickland in “Diarra From Detroit.” (BET / Paramount+ ) We really think Diarra is going to have this hot girl summer with Chris. But she finds herself in the middle of another wild and chaotic mission. What did you want out of Season 2’s journey?I wanted it to feel like a wild ride. I love appointment television. I wanted to make something that you didn’t exactly know what was going to come next or you don’t exactly know what’s going to come out of her mouth. This is not really the show to be on your phone, to be cooking dinner. I really want you to lock in and take this ride with us. I’m nostalgic for old murder mysteries. I’m nostalgic for time with my with my mom and my granny. But I’m also nostalgic for fun and the fun of summer. That feeling still hits my body when it starts to get hot — we’re supposed to be having fun, I’m supposed to go to summer camp, I’m supposed to fall in love and eat ice cream. And as adults, summer is just the same thing, but hotter, a lot of the times. I really wanted to take adults on a really fun summer ride. We started this season by writing down all the things that reminded us of the best summers of our lives — everything from ice cream to sleepovers to being out all day in the streets with your friends, a summer romance — and we try to infuse them. I really wanted to give people that ride, and for us to to end up in a very different place than we began. How did you arrive at the idea of a treasure hunt? The “Indiana Jones”-style poster for the season is so fun. That always excited me. I was living in Thailand for three and a half months. I was walking around the mall in Thailand because I was so homesick — and that just felt like America, to be in a mall. I bought “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”; I had never seen it before. I was 21 or 22. And my boyfriend at the time, we cuddled and watched “Indiana Jones” for the first time in Thailand. It was like the most American thing I could do, and I really fell in love with how uniquely fun that was. I always wanted to play in that space, and this season felt like the right time because it felt like a summer adventure thing. And then I had a moment right after my mom passed. I went to this artist talk. And there was a sculptor [Alison Saar] who was talking about her mother, Betye Saar. She was talking about making sculptures, and she was saying that she would sometimes go in Harlem and recover things — abandoned fixtures and pieces of things out of these brownstones — and she would incorporate them into her sculptures. She felt like these things, because they had witnessed Black life, had a certain vibrational frequency. I thought that was so chilling, this idea that we think they’re heirlooms, but they’ve witnessed generations of Black life and generations of your family’s life and what treasures they are and how much they meant to me when my mother passed to have to inherit my grandfather’s chair, my grandmother’s ornate bar cart. In many ways, those are our inheritance. They may not look like the trust funds that we wish we had, but they protect us. And I thought about, what if something like that went missing? We started with that missing artifact, and then extrapolated the metaphor that there could be a real, full treasure, bounty of Blackness, within this artifact.Not to be flippant, but a part of Black life that is a treasure now are Tubi movies. Without spoiling too much, there is a detour on this treasure hunt that leads Diarra and company into Tubi movie situation.I don’t want people to think I’m being flippant either. They say that Detroit is the Tubi capital of the world, and some of the movies maybe [have] poor production values, or maybe everybody in them didn’t have the chance to go to NYU Tisch School of the Arts like I did. So the acting choices are different. However, I find such value in the entrepreneurial spirit of these filmmakers, and also people who just have something to say and are putting it out there. I did want to honor them this season in saying, “I see you and I’m cheering you guys on.” So that was a fun little detour. Also, I was on a plane and I was watching “Argo.” I really wanted to use that as a basis for Episode 4. They have to go undercover in a film world — this was kind of our version of “Argo.” Shout out to Ben Affleck.Before I let you go, what’s the show you’re obsessed with right now that you’re telling everyone to watch?“Diarra From Detroit.” I also loved what they did tonally with “Widows Bay” [Apple TV]. That was a show that [my husband and I] watched together, and we were both freaked out. We started watching it in the day … because at midnight it’s creeping me out. I love creators that don’t flatten any part of the human experience. It’s like, “We’re all living on a razor’s edge of in life, like are we in a comedy or a drama, or a tragedy, or a farce?” You cannot tell when you read the news, you really cannot whittle it down to a single genre. And so I just love creators that lean into that, and that’s what I try to do as well.ICYMI Must-read stories you might have missed
