Beyond the Gates, the CBS daytime drama that premiered February 24, marks a number of notable firsts.
Set in the “DMV” (how locals refer to the D.C., Maryland and Virginia region), it is TV’s first new soap in a quarter-century. The first project born of a 2020 venture between CBS Studios and the NAACP, Beyond the Gates, which shoots in Atlanta, is also the first soap since 1991 to center around a Black family: the upper-crust Duprees, who like to hobnob pinkies-up at the Fairmont Crest country club, tucked inside their posh gated community.
“I thought it was important we were set in the DMV,” says executive producer Sheila Ducksworth (Wendy Williams: The Movie, BET’s Bigger), who first pitched the series in 2020. “It is, pound for pound, the most affluent area for Black Americans in the country, and [TV hasn’t] really explored it. Howard University plays such a big factor in the lives of Black Americans in D.C., Maryland and Virginia — people who’ve been educated in the schools of law, medicine and dentistry or got MBAs and moved to the suburbs. We wanted to have something that felt true.” (On the show, the fictional HBCU Benjamin Banneker University stands in for Howard.)
Until now, the first and last soap opera that focused on a Black family was NBC’s Generations, which ran from 1989 to 1991.
Michele Val Jean, who worked on Generations in 1991, created Beyond the Gates. In between, she wrote for Santa Barbara (1991–93), General Hospital (1993–2012) and The Bold and the Beautiful (2012–24). In her first outing as showrunner, she leads a team of 15 writers, all well-versed in cultural nuances and soaps' unique demands. “Most of the writers are veterans of daytime,” she says. “It’s a different kind of an animal. The production machine is relentless.”
Forty characters of varying hues, backgrounds and socioeconomic status inhabit this universe, but everything revolves around the Duprees: former senator Vernon Dupree, the patriarch (Clifton Davis, Billions, Madam Secretary); Anita, Vernon’s wife, a glamorous former singer (Tamara Tunie, As the World Turns); and their daughters, Nicole (Daphnee Duplaix, One Life to Live), a doctor with a perfect career but not-so-perfect marriage, and Dani (Karla Mosley, The Bold and the Beautiful), a free-spirited wild child.
Nearly all the below-the-line team is Black, which means everyone from hair stylists to set designers intuitively knows how to convey minute subtleties. “For instance, if there’s a patriarch in the family, they probably have their own chair, and if anyone dares to sit in it, that’s going to be a problem,” Ducksworth says. “We made that chair for Clifton, and nobody else is sitting in it.” Elsewhere, the front door to the Dupree manse features a door knocker resembling a lion — the Banneker school mascot.
A soap opera might seem an unlikely choice for the first CBS/NAACP collaboration, but Ducksworth says she’s been elated at CBS’s unwavering support. (P&G Studios, an arm of Procter & Gamble, which has produced and sponsored soaps since the 1930s, is also a partner on the show.) Val Jean promises lots of juicy, over-the-top theatrics — the kind she and so many Black women like her grew up immersed in while watching soaps with their grandmothers.
“We [are putting] on the soapiest, mess-iest universe that we possibly can, and hope everybody loves it like we do,” she says. “And trust me when I say we’ve got some mess.”
This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue #1, 2025, under the title "New Century, New Soap."
