‘Beyond the Gates’ is making history, but it’s also a ‘messy and entertaining’ soap
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New York — It has been more than 25 years since “Passions,” the last new daytime soap opera to air on American network TV, debuted on NBC.
And for nearly as long, Michele Val Jean and Sheila Ducksworth have dreamed of making a soap about an affluent Black family.
Their shared vision comes to fruition Monday when “Beyond the Gates,” a new drama following several generations of the wealthy Duprees, premieres on CBS. The series marks a historic breakthrough as the first daytime soap with a primarily Black cast on network TV. Yet it’s also something of a throwback to an earlier era of television, when daytime soaps were thriving.
At their peak, as many as 18 soap operas aired every day. Now, there are just three, all of which have been on TV for decades: “General Hospital” on ABC and “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” both on CBS. After 57 years on NBC, “Days of Our Lives” moved to Peacock in 2022.
But over lunch in Manhattan last week, Ducksworth expressed confidence in the future of the format.
“Soaps have been around for almost a hundred years. It’s the genre that never dies,” said Ducksworth, who is both executive producer on “Beyond the Gates” and president of the CBS Studios/NAACP venture, which developed the series. “I actually don’t think it ever will.”
The beloved CBS soap opera, which turns 50 Sunday, is a grueling feat of mass production made possible by writers well-versed in the mechanics of serial storytelling.
Ducksworth was joined by two of the veteran soap stars leading the cast: Tamara Tunie, who stars as formidable matriarch Anita Dupree, and Daphnée Duplaix, who plays her daughter, Dr. Nicole Dupree Richardson. Both bring decades of experience to “Beyond the Gates.” Tunie spent nearly 20 years on “As the World Turns,” while Duplaix starred in both “Passions” and “One Life to Live.”
The popularity of Fox’s prime-time soap “Empire,” which centered on a Black music dynasty and aired from 2015 to 2020, and Tyler Perry’s sudsier dramas such as “The Haves and the Have Nots,” suggests there’s a large potential audience for juicy yet aspirational dramas about glamorous Black families. According to Nielsen, Black adults spend 31% more time watching TV each week than the general population.
“Beyond the Gates” is the first series to emerge from the CBS-NAACP partnership, launched in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd with the goal of bringing inclusive stories to television. (The series is also produced in partnership with Procter & Gamble.) But it arrives at a politically and culturally fraught moment, when the very concept of diversity is under renewed attack by the Trump administration.
“At this time, when there seems to be a desire to turn back the clock in this country, I think it’s very important to show this affluent family that represents generational wealth in the Black community,” said Tunie, a longtime New Yorker who relocated to Atlanta to make the show. “That is something that has existed for hundreds of years but has not been put forth into the zeitgeist. I think this will have an incredible impact.”
Val Jean, the creator and showrunner, is a seasoned soap writer who’s scripted more than 2,000 episodes of daytime TV. Her primary goal is entertaining viewers, but there’s value in “Black people on television, looking rich and gorgeous,” she said. “It’s something else to focus on that can be uplifting and entertaining, and we can see ourselves in it.”
Talk to anyone who has ever been a fan of daytime soap operas, and they will fondly recall a habit that was forged in childhood, when they raced home after school to watch “Days of Our Lives,” “All My Children” or “Dark Shadows” with their mom, grandmother, sister or aunt.
For Val Jean, it was “General Hospital.” “My grandmother took care of us, so she always had the soaps on, and by osmosis, they seeped into my brain,” she said. Like much of the country, she was hooked on the Luke and Laura love story. She still remembers watching their wedding on a 13-inch black-and-white TV on her desk at work.
Ducksworth was also raised on soaps, watching “The Edge of Night” and “General Hospital.” Although she was fascinated by the storytelling, she would also find herself eagerly anticipating the moments when Claudia Johnston Phillips, the character played by Bianca Ferguson, appeared onscreen. “I would just wait for the character that looked like me,” she said. “That was the high point — seeing her on TV.”
Like sands through the hourglass, the soap moved to Peacock recently after 57 years on NBC. Whether fans follow could determine the genre’s fate.
As a college student a few years later, Ducksworth was gripped by “Generations,” an NBC soap that broke new ground by featuring a Black family from its inception in 1989. The show’s short but memorable run inspired Ducksworth to move to Los Angeles and make more TV like it — including, she hoped, a Black soap. Vivica A. Fox, who had starred in “Generations,” introduced her to Val Jean, who had been the show’s only Black writer and, it turned out, had written a pilot script for a soap about a wealthy Black family.
The project didn’t move forward, but Ducksworth vowed she would one day make a soap with Val Jean. When she began at the CBS-NAACP venture, Val Jean was one of the first people she called. Ducksworth had the idea to set the series in a gated community in suburban Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., a region that is home to some of the most affluent majority-Black counties in the country.
Even with decades of experience writing soaps, building one from the ground up was a challenge for Val Jean. Because it’s been so long since anyone has created a new daytime drama, for instance, there weren’t any examples of show “bibles,” the pitch documents outlining characters and story arcs, for her to work from.
But she started by focusing on the matriarch and the patriarch. “Who are characters that we’ve never seen before?” She came up with Anita, a girl-group singer who rose out of poverty in Chicago and met her husband, Vernon (Clifton Davis), a former senator, at a civil rights march. “I thought, ‘What if Diana Ross met John Lewis?’” Val Jean said.
Everything else flowed from there. “I would take my morning walk, and I would think about it, and I’d come home, and I‘d just jot down ideas on index cards for the first couple of months,” Val Jean recalled. “Then I started writing. I got my big stack of index cards and sorted through them, and there the characters were. There were their stories. I was basically a stenographer.”
The Duprees have two daughters: Nicole, a level-headed psychiatrist (Duplaix), and the fiery Dani (Karla Mosley), whose ex-husband Bill (Timon Kyle Durrett) left her for their daughter’s best friend Hayley (Marquita Goings). The series opens a few days before Bill and Hayley’s wedding, set to take place at the local country club — much to Dani’s horror.
Unlike “Passions,” which leaned hard on the supernatural and featured a character who was an animated doll, “Beyond the Gates” is grounded in the basics: love, hate and betrayal. “I don’t foresee any aliens,” Val Jean said.
Launching any new show is a considerable feat, but a daily soap opera that airs roughly 250 times a year and films 80 or more script pages a day is an entirely different beast. Actors have to quickly memorize many pages of dialogue, and sometimes perform in a dozen different scenes from multiple episodes in a single day on set. Although Atlanta is a well-established production hub, it has never been home to a daily soap opera.
Once production began in November, experienced soap stars like Tunie and Duplaix helped guide cast members who were new to the pace of daytime, which can feel like drinking from a fire hose.
“Even when we were at about a quarter of the work that we needed to accomplish for the day, everybody was like, ‘Oh, my God, are you kidding me?’” Duplaix said. “I’m like, ‘Honey, this is a quarter of what we’re supposed to be doing.’” She shared tips, like her process for memorizing lines. Once you get a stack of scripts, she said, “Read your sides for 30 minutes every day, so it’s familiar. Then you can really hone in a day or two before you film the scene. When you know your stuff, that confidence resonates with the audience.”
“It’s like being in the trenches together,” added Tunie, who has taken on the role of informal acting coach and sent an email early in production to her fellow cast members in which she shared tips on “how to navigate the genre and bring your best performance, to understand the pace in which we work and what the directors and producers are capable of providing.”
Ducksworth, who jokingly calls Tunie “Queen Mother,” said it was vital to cast the role of Anita first “because our matriarch was so important.”
Economic headwinds have left the CBS Television Studios/NAACP pact without a finished product. But executives say they’re as committed as ever.
For Tunie and Duplaix, the historic nature of the project was a major selling point, something that helped entice them back to the grueling world of daytime.
“There are so many firsts,” Duplaix said of “Beyond the Gates.” “It’s a first to have this African American family at the center. It’s going to be exciting to see how people respond to it.”
But Val Jean is focused on “keeping it messy and entertaining,” rather than conveying a specific social message. And mess there is: The first episode ends with one character slapping another across the face, Susan Lucci-style. There’s more histrionics where that came from.
The goal, she said, is authenticity: “This show is centered around a sprawling Black family that loves and makes mistakes and flies off the handle. They don’t always agree, but the foundation is deep, abiding, eternal love. This family would do anything for each other, and that’s authentic too.”
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