Going “Beyond The Gates”

Majority-Black cast looking to resurrect daytime serials and daytime TV

It’s been 25 years since a daytime serial debuted on television when Passions premiered on NBC. 

Since then, the soap opera genre has lost steam through the 1990s and 2000s, as younger viewers defected toward the more real-life (if you can call it that) drama of daytime talk shows such as Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, and Maury. The worst period was between 2009 and 2011, when veteran shows Guiding Light, As The World Turns, One Life To Live and All My Children left the airwaves. NBC sent Days of Our Lives to Peacock after a 47-year run two years ago, leaving just three soaps on the networks’ daytime schedule as the decline of linear TV in the streaming era has impacted the daypart more than any other.

Now, there’s hope – not only for soaps but for daytime TV in general, as the highly-anticipated Beyond The Gates premiered on CBS February 24, a joint venture announced last year between CBS, the NAACP, and Proctor & Gamble Studios – the company that pioneered the soap opera in the 1930s on radio and television in the 1950s, returning to TV production for the first time since ATWT was canceled in 2010. 

The serial follows the tribes and tribulations of the wealthy DuPree family in a fictional gated community called Fairmount Crest, located in Prince George’s County, Md. – one of the wealthiest Black areas in the country in real-life, just north of Washington, D.C. (think south suburban Olympia Fields and Flossmoor, only larger.) It’s the first soap opera to premiere with a mostly-Black cast since NBC’s Generations, which ran from March 1989 to January 1991, and the first since Passions. Beyond The Gates parallels Empire, a primetime soap featuring a wealthy Black family that ran on Fox from 2015-20 and was shot here in Chicago. 

The cast features Tamara Tunie (an ATWT alum) as Anita DuPree, a retired entertainer and EGOT recipient, and Clifton Davis as Vernon Dupree, a former Civil Rights activist with daughters Nicole (Daphnee Duplaix), who is a psychiatrist, and Dani (Karla Mosley), a former model who is steaming after her ex-husband left her for another woman. The extended family is too numerous to list here; there is a secondary family named the McBrides, who interact frequently with the Duprees. 

And judging by its first week, Gates has all the trademark trimmings of a daytime serial – betrayal, sex, romance, angst, a thrown coffee cup, and a slap in the face – and that was just in the first episode. 

“These are characters you’ve never seen before,” creator Michele Val Jean told Variety in an interview. “There is, however, one thing that fans will recognize: The show has all the soapy elements that will reel in viewers. It’s a messy daytime drama, with secrets and lies and betrayals and love and hate. But most importantly, the Duprees are a family that loves each other. And they might fight, they might disagree, they might be mad at each other, but if one of them needs something, that family is there. And I think that’s an important thing to show a really solid Black family that is sensual.” Val Jean received her first writing assignment on Generations and co-executive produced the show with Sheila Duckworth, Robert Guza, Jr., Leon W. Russell, and Derrick Johnson.

For Davis – a fifty-year television alum with roles in That’s My Mama, Amen, and Madam Secretary, it’s a chance to bring characters you usually don’t see on the small screen. 

“Sometimes we get lost in the stereotypical images that we see on television,” Davis told NPR writer Eric Deggans.“[Black characters] are the hoodlums, the hustlers, and those kinds of things, which is all a part of life. But you haven’t seen there are communities in the United States where African Americans are tremendously affluent. And it’s those kinds of stories we’re touching on that haven’t been told before.”

For those watching a daytime serial for the first time, the structure is different from what you find on a network or streaming drama. Beyond The Gates has a six-act structure – similar to what syndicated dramas such as Star Trek: The Next Generation had to accommodate more commercials. And with soaps, you have faster-paced storylines and cut back and forth more than serialized streaming and prime-time dramas do. Since daytime serials are stripped and need to provide storylines nearly year-around, the number of pages per script can easily top 40-50 per hour and nearly 200 per week – far more than a weekly network or streaming drama, which usually has 60 pages an episode on average (though Gilmore Girls had an average of 80 per script and Moonlighting had 120 due to the characters’ ability in each show to talk very fast.) Gates is aiming to read one hundred pages a day. 

Unlike other soaps that are shot in Los Angeles, Gates is recorded at the nineteen-stage Assembly Studios in the Atlanta suburb of Doraville, Ga., in a facility built by Gray Media, which owns CBS affiliate WANX and CW affiliate WPCH (Peachtree TV – the former WTBS) in the market. The studio where the show is recorded has 27 sets – ranging from a Doctor’s office to a spacious living room to a country club. 

So far, Beyond The Gates is off to a solid start in the ratings. In its first week in its 2 p.m. ET slot (1 p.m. Central), the show drew 5.2 million unique viewers and averaged 2.28 million viewers with three days of DVR recordings, up 78 percent from since-canceled The Talk a year ago, and was up 56 percent in the female 18-49 and 25-54 demos, beating General Hospital head-to-head and tying the veteran soap among total linear viewers, including DVRs (keep in mind in markets where ABC owns a station, including New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, et. al, Gates‘ opposition is Tamron Hall, as General Hospital airs an hour later.)

Among live-plus-seven-day viewers, the show drew three million viewers, almost the same number Passions drew in its July 5, 1999 premiere in a different era of television. Gates‘ audience composition is 55 percent Black – more than CBS’s two other soaps, and General Hospital, and is the top soap in the demo. 

Gates is also available on Paramount Plus with live streaming and on-demand options depending on plan; viewership numbers weren’t available. The first full week of episodes is available on Pluto TV, with more to be added soon. 

The news is certainly encouraging as Beyond The Gates is something we usually don’t see in daytime television – let alone primetime television, and it comes at a time when DEI initiatives are under attack from the White House and other right-wing government leaders, who are now trying to silence voices of minorities. The lack of diversity is still a problem, as Issa Rae pointed out this past weekend at SXSW and one this space has pointed out repeatedly. One can dismiss Beyond The Gates as just another TV show, but there’s a lot more at stake than people think. So far, the results are good – in ratings and the quality department, and here’s hoping Beyond The Gates will be open for years to come. 

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