“DIARRA FROM DETROIT” SEASON 2 HAS EVERYTHING I WANT FROM A GHETTO GOONIE MURDER MYSTERY

TV has never met a murder mystery it couldn’t slap another genre in front of. Comedy murder-mystery. Action murder-mystery. Superhero murder-mystery. At this point, if two people enter a room and one of them leaves dead, somebody's getting eight episodes and a suspiciously stacked cast.

The girls love crime. What can I say?

But Diarra From Detroit has always felt like more than just another entry in the murder-mystery pile. Created by Diarra Kilpatrick, the series mixes noir, romance, friendship comedy and an almost pathological inability to mind your business into something warm, weird and ridiculously easy to spend time with.

Its first season turned one missing Tinder date into a kidnapping conspiracy. Now Diarra's back, and before long, there’s a triple murder, buried treasure, Detroit gangsters, secret tunnels and another mystery Diarra absolutely could not walk away from.

When you say "treasure hunt", I hear "avoidance".

Season two, fittingly, picks up at a backyard barbecue, where Diarra (Diarra Kilpatrick) escorts Chris (Shannon Wallace), aka Deonte, through a welcome-home party thrown by his extended biological family and Diarra’s crew, Aja (DomiNque Perry) and Tea (Bryan Terrell Clark).

Chris is finally home after Diarra successfully found her missing Tinder date at the end of season one. Unfortunately, that reunion hasn't magically turned their relationship into the happily-ever-after she imagined while risking her life to save him. Chris is traumatized. Diarra is questioning whether they actually have a future. And because this woman has apparently never heard of processing one major life event before beginning another, she’s still quietly investigating who was behind his kidnapping.

So while everyone else is eating, drinking and welcoming Chris home, Diarra is working.

She’s still trying to identify the Detroit power player known only as the Chief, the man behind the hit on Chris. She suspects Chris’s mother, Vonda (Phylicia Rashad), knows more than she’s letting on and uses the party as cover for a quick look around her house. That snooping eventually leads Diarra to Walter Harley, a powerful businessman she discovers is both the mysterious Chief and Chris’s biological father.

Harley makes it very clear that continuing to investigate him would be bad for Diarra’s health and possibly everyone else’s. So, for once, she agrees to let something go.

With the Chief investigation supposedly behind her, Diarra turns her attention to what should be a much easier problem: helping her landlord Ron retrieve an antique piece of furniture. Chris comes along, which seems harmless enough until they arrive and find three people dead. Chris is arrested for the murders, and suddenly Diarra is trying to clear the name of the same boyfriend she just rescued.

From there, season two becomes National Treasure if Nicolas Cage had a silk press.

The furniture belonged to Duncan Duckett, an old Detroit bootlegger who left behind rumors of a massive hidden fortune. Finding it means following maps, chess pieces, riddles and secret tunnels through Detroit history. Booker, a witness to the Coney Island murders whose testimony could help clear Chris, agrees to talk if Diarra helps him find Duncan’s treasure. So Diarra pulls Aja and Tea into another investigation, dubs herself Michigan Jones and starts digging.

But Diarra isn't the only one interested in Duncan’s treasure.

Cartier Kelly (the terminally underrated Bokeem Woodbine), a feared crime figure whose collection of old Detroit gangster memorabilia helps Diarra follow Duncan’s trail. But once he realizes there may actually be a fortune at the end of it, he wants the treasure for himself and makes it very clear that Diarra and her crew staying alive depends on her finding it for him. Booker eventually reveals that there were two shooters involved in the Coney Island murders—and that he was one of them. Meanwhile, Duncan’s rumored fortune balloons to $100 million, making it increasingly clear that everybody wants the fortune and approximately nobody can be trusted.

By the finale, Booker has betrayed Diarra after they finally reach what they believe is Duncan’s stash, only to get buried in a collapsing tunnel when he refuses to leave it behind. Video evidence finally surfaces that clears Chris of the murders. Diarra and the remaining Ghetto Goonies stage a fake wedding to reach another underground hiding place, where rival factions converge, gunfire breaks out and Cartier ends up dead.

And while all of that is happening, the season’s more personal problems come due too. Diarra’s biological clock goes into overdrive as her doubts about Chris are compounded by the reemergence of a matured ex-boyfriend who’s eager to have kids (Cliff “Method Man” Smith). She’s also still managing lingering feelings for Danger—no, not the thrill she gets from unsafe sleuthing, but her childhood friend (Jon Chaffin). Aja learns that Harley’s organization was behind the drug operation that hijacked her hair business and that Diarra knew Harley was the Chief and never told her.

And after an entire season of people killing, kidnapping and scheming over Duncan Duckett’s legendary gold, everyone discovers there is no gold.

There's water.

Extremely pure water, actually—potentially worth billions.

Diarra solves the case and receives a whopping $25 for surviving several near-death experiences, essentially beginning her career as a private investigator. Chris is cleared and comes home, but he and Diarra have to face the fact that their relationship isn’t what they thought it would be. Aja is furious. And Diarra and Tea are now sitting on the small matter of knowing there may be a billion-dollar natural resource underneath Detroit.

So much for easing back into normal life.

We treasure hunting like we the Ghetto Goonies.

Like Detroiters and Out of Sight crossed with Indiana Jones and The Goonies, season two could easily tip into doing-too-much territory if it weren’t so committed to being funny.

The episodes make as much room for breaks in the case as they do breaks from the case, usually with everybody sitting down for strong cocktails and social catch-ups. They grab meals at a gentrified local club with historic ties to the investigation. They pour drinks at Diarra’s house before poring over new evidence. Somebody is always finding an excuse to host a happy hour, even when there’s very little to be happy about, and that easy joy is infectious.

It keeps the show from ever feeling buried under its own plot. And a lot of that comes down to Aja and Tea.

There is no Diarra without her best friends. I honestly could’ve used more Aja than I got this season, because whenever Perry, Clark and Kilpatrick fill the frame together, something wonderful happens. One sequence sends Diarra and Aja undercover as men to infiltrate a Masonic lodge, where their fake identities somehow have to survive an initiation involving masculine posturing, a goat and the very real possibility that somebody might ask them to prove they have dicks. Another crams Diarra, Aja and Tea into a kiddie pool. Both are comedy gold.

Above all else, this is the friendship that keeps a viewer coming back to a series.

Which is why the fallout with Aja lands harder than most of the season’s actual violence.

Diarra will risk herself without thinking twice, but she’s increasingly making that decision for everybody around her too. Keeping Walter Harley’s identity from Aja isn’t another goofy detective choice. It’s a betrayal. And Aja telling her she needs space leaves Diarra with something she can’t investigate her way out of.

Her love life isn’t much easier.

She’s thinking about becoming a mother while trying to decide whether she and Chris make sense outside of some very unusual circumstances. Her ex enters the picture and provides an extremely compelling argument for exploring one’s options. Danger is still Danger, which presents its own extremely compelling argument. By the finale, Diarra has somehow become emotionally entangled with three men while helping prevent an all-out gang war.

Women really can have it all.

The mystery does occasionally becomes a lot. Duncan Duckett’s treasure, the Coney Island murders, Walter Harley, Cartier, and Detroit’s various criminal factions start stacking up until keeping track of who wants what from whom feels like its own investigation. There are moments when I stopped trying to remember exactly who had double-crossed whom and decided somebody would eventually explain it to me.

Honestly, I mostly want to see where Diarra’s next terrible idea takes us.

What’s become increasingly cool to watch is how the show uses its setting. People used to joke that New York was the fifth main character in Sex and the City, and I’m starting to think the same can be said of Detroit in Diarra From Detroit.

The treasure hunt sends Diarra backward through the city’s history—bootlegging routes, neighborhoods, churches, families, money and grudges that have been sitting around long enough to become mythology. So when Duncan’s legendary gold turns out to be water beneath Detroit, the reveal is funny, absurd and surprisingly fitting. Everyone spends the season looking for a fortune some dead man hid away, only to discover that the real thing of value has been underneath the city the entire time.

It also leaves Diarra with the most Diarra problem imaginable. She started the season trying to retrieve somebody’s furniture. She ends it knowing a secret potentially worth billions.

This woman should never be allowed to run a simple errand again.

So naturally, I need season three immediately.

9/10 ★ If you’re not watching Diarra From Detroit by now, what are you doing with your life?