“Beyond the Gates” Brings Soap Operas Back to Daytime TV

As a student at Yale, Sheila Ducksworth often rushed home to indulge in two favorite guilty pleasures. She’d stop for dessert at Durfee’s Sweet Shoppe before catching up on her soap operas with a friend.

She had grown up watching her stories. “Generations,” the NBC soap opera that debuted in 1989 and the first to highlight a Black family from its inception, became must-watch television while she was in college. She saw herself in the characters, and she yearned for the 30-minute show, ultimately short-lived, to be stretched into a daily hour like most other soaps.

Ducksworth started a career in television production with the idea of one day producing a soap opera even as they began to disappear from the airwaves. In 2020, with her treasured daytime serials still front of mind, she agreed to lead a new partnership between CBS and the N.A.A.C.P., and immediately set out to resuscitate the faltering genre.

That doggedness will result in something that has not occurred this century: a daytime soap debuting on a major television network. “Beyond the Gates,” premiering on Feb. 24, will be the first since NBC introduced “Passions” in 1999. And it will be the first ever that’s completely centered on a Black family.

“This is really almost a 30-year passion, the point of getting this made,” Ducksworth said from Assembly Atlanta, the studio complex where the show is filmed, as cast and crew careened from scene to scene filming the story that centers on the Dupree family in suburban Maryland.

At their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, soap operas were foundational fixtures in daytime lineups, with names that even non-viewers would recognize: “All My Children.” “One Life to Live.” “As the World Turns.” They were where budding actors and future stars like Demi Moore, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman landed some of their first roles. They lured, clutched and dangled the collective attentions of housewives, nighttime shift workers, children home sick from school and workers playing hooky.

That viewership included a dedicated demographic that Ducksworth and the co-creator of “Beyond the Gates,” Michele Val Jean, will aim to attract.

“There is an audience out there that for decades had not been represented or catered to, to say, ‘This is for you,’” said Tamara Tunie, who will serve as the matriarch of the fictional, affluent and very messy Dupree dynasty. “And this is the Black audience. And the Black audience has been very loyal to daytime drama for decades and decades and decades. The Black dollars are very strong and waiting to be spent. I think that this show is being provided for that constituency.”

Historically, soap operas did not just baptize lifetime viewers. Devotion was familial, passed down like genetic material, one generation to the next. Allegiances were pledged and honored, similar to fandom for a preferred sports team.

“You didn’t change,” Val Jean said. “My mother and my grandmother and I, we were an ABC family. We watched ‘Ryan’s Hope,’ ‘All My Children,’ ‘One Life to Live,’ ‘General Hospital.’”

The alluring, tawdry stories arrived as frequently as the reliability and promptness of that day’s mail: Would Sami be saved from death row? What would happen at Luke and Laura’s wedding? Did Erica Kane really just do that?

They provided “something we could kiki and gossip about,” Val Jean said.

Over time and with improved technology and new formats, viewership habits shifted and fractured.

So-called reality trumped fantasy. Soap operas had presented what people always wanted to say but never could. Reality television came along and suddenly people were saying (and throwing) what had previously been left unsaid (and untossed).

The O.J. Simpson murder trial 30 years ago may have initiated soap’s free fall when it diverted daytime eyeballs to the televised trial of the century. “Jerry Springer” free-for-alls quickened the decline. The rise of the Kardashian and Real Housewives era of reality television signified that viewership appetites had completely changed.

In 2022, NBCUniversal moved “Days of Our Lives” to Peacock after a nearly 60-year run on the flagship network. The decision left only three soap operas — ABC’s “General Hospital” and CBS’s “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful” — airing on daytime TV. There were seven soaps on the networks as recently as 2010.

When soaps thrived, it was because of the ritual and routine they offered viewers. The connection came through watching characters love, fight, cheat, argue, age every … single … weekday.

“People who are watching ‘The Young and the Restless’ today probably grew up watching Victor Newman and Victoria Newman for over 40 years,” said Barbara Irwin, a soap opera expert who has written books about the genre and served as an audience researcher. “There’s a parasocial relationship that viewers establish with soap opera characters, where these people come into their homes every day for decades and they come to love these characters or love to hate the characters.”

“You’re not just watching reruns, every day is new so you’re literally living the life of these characters and experiencing their experiences every day,” said Julie Carruthers, an executive producer of “Beyond the Gates” and a veteran of the genre whose work dates back to NBC’s “Santa Barbara” nearly 40 years ago.

Like many, Carruthers thought the soaps were expiring. “Beyond the Gates” is happening, she said, because “Sheila made it happen.”

Ducksworth has done a little bit of everything in television. Before CBS, she headed scripted television and production for Will Packer Media and ran her own production company. She found a soap ally in the CBS president and chief executive George Cheeks, who had also been thinking about the potential for a new daytime serial.

“I really do believe that the genre may not look the way it looked before — in terms of every network has three soap operas, every single day — but there’s still an audience for it,” Cheeks said.

He values their predictability in sustaining audiences. The genre, to him, never left, but rather converted to “unscripted soap operas” like Bravo’s “Below Deck” and “Real Housewives” franchise.

“If you’re going to go see something staged, why not see people who can really deliver in a way that’s skillful and that pulls on your heartstrings in an intentional way, but also allows for fun and warmth?” said the actress Karla Mosley, who will portray one of the daughters of Tunie’s character.

Ducksworth’s initial meeting with Cheeks led to years of pitch meetings to secure partnerships. “Beyond the Gates” marks Procter & Gamble’s reintroduction into soap operas as a production partner with CBS. The consumer goods company offered the genre its name and populated radio and TV airwaves for 70 years before exiting in 2009 with the cancellation of “As the World Turns.”

The series is also the first product in the joint venture between CBS and the N.A.A.C.P. Derrick Johnson cited the need for the organization to become better a storyteller when he became president and chief executive in 2017.

“The history of this country has always told us that how people are seen onscreen are oftentimes how they’re treated in public policy,” he said. (In fact, one of the organization’s earliest initiatives was to fight the showing of “Birth of a Nation” at the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency.) “We’ve always been in a space where we’ve been in a reactive posture. Our goal, in this case, was to be in a proactive posture.”

While others are cutting them, CBS is betting big on soaps. “Beyond the Gates” is replacing the daytime gabfest “The Talk,” canceled after 15 seasons. Last year, the network renewed “The Young and the Restless” for four additional seasons, securing it through 2027-28 as the network’s longest-running series. In addition to airing on CBS, “Beyond the Gates” will be prominently featured on the network’s streaming platform, Paramount+. Enthusiasm does not guarantee success, though.

“It is really hard to launch a new soap and to build the kind of loyalty that the others now have,” said Elana Levine, author of “Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera & US Television History.” “Even the youngest is nearing 40 years on air.”

The questions popped in Karla Mosley’s mind as she weighed whether to vie for a role on “Beyond the Gates”: Did she want to move from California to Georgia? Would her family come now or later? Would her daughters attend a new school or be home-schooled?

As Mosley contemplated family, the actress Daphnée Duplaix had nearly quit show business. The pace and commitment of a soap is unlike anything else in television. More than 250 episodes annually is still the norm in a landscape where eight-episode seasons of prestige television every other year is often the norm.

But none of the actors felt that they could say no to the opportunity. The series will depict all ages and races. And with two Black women in creative control, a collective mix of ownership, pride and excitement is palpable among the cast and crew.

“The weight of what we’re bringing to the table for audiences and what it means is giant,” Duplaix, who’ll play the eldest Dupree daughter, said.

Clifton Davis was pondering retirement after nearly 50 years of acting. A veteran of stage and screen, he’s happy he took one more role. “You ever go to work, and a smile bursts on your face when you’re walking in the door?” Davis asked. “You know that’s a good job.”

Assembly Studios bustled on a recent shooting day.

Actors and crew hustled — rehearsing, taping and finishing a scene before quickly moving onto the next. The goal is to film nearly 100 pages worth of script a day.

The costume designer Jeresa Featherstone anticipated receiving new actors who would begin the next day. She would shop for their outfits that evening. Before filming, Duplaix found comfort sitting in Wankaya Hinkson’s chair as the stylist worked on her hair. Hinkson said she hopes to have all textures of Black hair displayed on the show.

“I got to a point where I would always bring my makeup or my flat iron to fix, to just tweak it a little bit,” Duplaix said of past gigs. “I have yet to even feel like I need to do that.”

“This is a multicultural show,” said Tunie, who starred for years on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” “There are White people, Latin people, Asian people, and that’s groundbreaking, too, because it’s representing everyone. But this Black family is the central family, and everything springs from there. That’s very different than anything I experienced before.”

Val Jean wrote on “Generations,” the show Ducksworth once adored. “You know I wrote that cat fight, right?” she asked during an interview, a sly smile creeping across her face. That scene, in which the actresses Vivica A. Fox and Jonelle Allen punch and grapple with each for a full two minutes while bringing destruction to a fancy living room, has achieved status as a canonical moment in soap opera lore. But the show itself lasted just two seasons, signifying what the author Levine calls the genre’s “checkered history of centering Black characters.”

It was Fox who introduced Ducksworth and Val Jean more than 20 years ago. Ducksworth told her of her dreams of making a soap. Val Jean by that point was one of soap’s most prolific writers, most notably for “General Hospital” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” As Ducksworth contemplated accepting the CBS job, she reached out to Val Jean and asked her to start imagining a world revolving around a sprawling Black family of influence.

“I wanted to see a big Black family that’s rooted in their love for each other, and they’re accomplished and they’re smart and they’re rich and they’re not downtrodden,” Val Jean said. Even as she built out the characters, it was hard to envision the show becoming a reality, despite Ducksworth’s reassurances.

Her enthusiasm swelled once production started. That was apparent to Tunie, who first appeared on “As the World Turns” back in 1987, and has seen her share of television productions in the almost 40 years since. “This,” Tunie promised, “is not your grandma’s soap opera.”