‘Beyond the Gates’ team previews groundbreaking Black daytime soap

A posh gated community, flanked with luxe mansions and picturesque tree-lined streets (and filled with tantalizing scandals) is the setting for Beyond the Gates, a new daytime soap from Emmy-winning soap veteran Michele Val Jean. 

Premiering Feb. 24 on CBS, the series is set in the Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., one of the most affluent African American counties in the United States. At the center of the community are the Duprees, led by genteel patriarch Vernon (played by Clifton Davis), a retired senator, and fierce matriarch Anita (Tamara Tunie), a former singer. Alongside daughters Nicole (Daphnee Duplaix), a high-achieving philanthropist and psychiatrist, and Dani (Karla Mosley), a free-spirited former model-turned-momager, the multi-generational Duprees are considered a powerful and prestigious family and the “very definition of Black royalty,” per the show’s logline — but beneath the opulence reside juicy secrets.

Notable firsts surround the new soap: It’s the first new entry of the genre since Passions premiered in 1999, and the first to center on Black characters since 1989’s groundbreaking Generations, which centered on two Chicago families, the white Whitmores and Black Marshalls and also counted Val Jean, whose expansive credits include General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful, as a writer. Gates was spearheaded by a determined Sheila Ducksworth, the president of CBS’ production partnership with the NAACP and an executive producer on the show, in a four-year effort to break new ground in the genre. 

“We wanted to have a show on the air that spoke to a different side of the Black experience,” Val Jean tells Entertainment Weekly over a joint Zoom with Ducksworth. “Not the downtrodden, not the ghettoized. We wanted to show rich, Black people doing messy things.”

“I’ve long been fascinated with showing the side that we haven’t seen a lot of,” says Ducksworth. “In these Maryland suburbs, there were some of the most affluent African American counties in all of America. So looking at that and the wealth of everything at Howard University, I felt that this was an area that was ripe for the picking. You get the upstairs, the downstairs of it all. It’s true to life.”

Breaking new ground is, of course, no easy feat, but it’s a department Val Jean is familiar with due to Generations, which was both her first staff job and daytime soap. “Sally Sussman created not only a wonderful show but a wonderful atmosphere,” she recalls of that period. “We were the little soap that couldn’t, really, because we were opposite the last half hour of Young and the Restless.” Generations was very much ahead of its time, adds Val Jean. “When it got canceled, to me personally, it felt like a death because I was so happy there.”

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It was Generations, too, that launched the 20-year friendship between Val Jean and Ducksworth that has led to this historical endeavor, thanks in part to an actress by the name of Vivica A. Fox. Perhaps you’ve heard of her? Fox played Maya Reubens, the onscreen daughter of Richard Roundtree’s Dr. Daniel Reubens, in the soap, and counts Ducksworth as a friend. “I told her that I wanted to make a soap, and she said, ‘Well, if you want to make a soap, you need to talk to Michele,’” recalls Ducksworth. “So she really put the two of us together.”

Two decades later, the duo are ready to present a new take on the genre — though it still contains all the hallmarks of a great soap. Expect “secrets and lies and betrayals and love and friendship,” says Val Jean. “The Duprees, they don’t always agree. But when push comes to shove, that family will stick together, right, wrong or indifferent. That is basically the foundation of the show. There’s dysfunction, but at the end of the day, they love each other.” Adds Ducksworth, “It’s a really complex web of people and places and things that all intersect in a way that you would never believe. It’s incredibly unpredictable and really fresh and new.”

Admittedly, Val Jean initially didn’t believe that their labor of love “would ever see the light of day.” “Networks weren’t greenlighting soaps, they were canceling them,” she explains. “When I started Generations there were 13 soaps on the air, now there are three and one on Peacock.” Getting the green light felt “revolutionary,” says Ducksworth. “Nobody is making soaps anymore. The courage and belief that there could be something new that hasn’t been done in over a quarter of a century, it feels great that the people behind us recognized the need and wanted to make this happen.”

“This is a different kind of world,” says Val Jean of Gates. “The characters are different from anything that I’ve seen in daytime. That’s what I’m excited about. We’re presenting something that hasn’t been done before.”

Beyond the Gates debuts Feb. 24 at 2 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT, on CBS and will also be available to stream on Paramount+.