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(From l. to r.) Daphnee Duplaix (Dr. Nicole Dupree Richardson), Tamara Tunie (Anita Dupree), Clifton Davis (Vernon Dupree) and Karla Mosley (Dani Dupree) make up part of the new soap’s main power family.
Fans are eagerly anticipating the first new soap to premiere since Passions in 1999, Beyond The Gates, to make its debut on CBS on February 24 at 2 p.m. ET — and now the driving forces behind the new endeavor are speaking out about what viewers can expect from the groundbreaking endeavor.
Get Ready
The creator, executive producer and head writer of Beyond The Gates, Michele Val Jean, and Executive Producer Sheila Ducksworth recently gave a joint interview to Entertainment Weekly where they discussed the roots of their collaboration and the inspiration behind the new series.
The two powerhouse women have known each other for a few decades, having met through an actress they were both friends with — Vivica A. Fox. Fox played Maya Reubens on Generations (the half-hour NBC show aired between 1989-1991), the first soap that focused on Black characters, which just so happened to be the first daytime staff writing job that future Daytime Emmy-winning Val Jean had. “I told [Fox] that I wanted to make a soap, and she said, ‘Well, if you want to make a soap, you need to talk to Michele,’ ” Ducksworth recalled to EW. “So she really put the two of us together.”
In conceiving the blueprint of BTG, “We wanted to have a show on the air that spoke to a different side of the Black experience,” Val Jean told EW. “Not the downtrodden, not the ghettoized. We wanted to show rich, Black people doing messy things.”
The women recognized that getting the show on the air might be an uphill battle; after all, since Generations went off the air in 1991, only four soaps (The City, Sunset Beach, Port Charles and Passions) have gotten the green light, and none of them remain on the air, while among the soaps in the daytime lineup at the time of Generations‘ premiere, seven — Another World, All My Children, As The World Turns, Guiding Light, Loving, One Life to Live and Santa Barbara, had gotten the axe by their respective network homes. Duckworth noted that CBS green-lighting the show felt “revolutionary,” and added that “it feels great that the people behind us recognized the need and wanted to make this happen.”
The soap is set in the ritzy Maryland suburbs just outside of Washington, D.C., which was selected because of its real-world demographics. Explained Ducksworth, “In these Maryland suburbs, there were some of the most affluent African American counties in all of America.” As for what fans can expect from the characters and storylines from BTG, Val Jean teased, “The characters are different from anything that I’ve seen in daytime…. We’re presenting something that hasn’t been done before.”
While the show will break the mold in some regards, it will also stay true to the dramatic basics that soap fans expect — “secrets and lies and betrayals and love and friendship,” as Val Jean put it. Duckworth enthused, “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.”
For a first look of the show, click here.
