After just 26 years, a new soap arrives

As she molded the glittery world of “Beyond the Gates” (shown here) Michele Val Jean suspected it might be an empty exercise.
After all, there hadn’t been a new daytime soap opera since 1999. Soaps were being canceled, not created.
“There were 13 on the air,” she said. “Now there are four – and one is streaming.”
But now it’s happening: At 2 p.m. Feb. 24, “Beyond the Gates” debuts on CBS. We’ll meet the Duprees, who are rich, Black, ambitious and – this is a soap, after all – troubled.
Dani Dupree, for instance, gets to sweep a scoundrel’s desk clean with one swing of a golf club. “I was excited about that from the moment I read it in the script,” said Karla Mosley, who plays her.
She’s used to the soap-style emotions, with substantial stays on “Guiding Light” and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” plus a couple weeks on “The Young and the Restless.” Daphne Duplaix, who plays her sister (Dr. Nicole Dupree Richardson) had long stays on “Passions” and “One Life to Live”; Tamara Tunie, who plays their mom, did “As the World Turns.”
Only Clifton Davis, who plays the dad, is sort of new to this. He did a couple episodes of “A World Apart,” then went on to a primetime career that ranged from starring in the “Amen” comedy to playing the intelligence chief in “Madam Secretary.”
Now he plays someone who’s not like many of the soap patriarchs. “This character really does love his two girls and his wife,” Davis said.
Stepping into the soap world, Tunie said, takes some adjustment, “because of the speed that you have to learn the material …. It’s fast and furious.”
Then again, she’s used to that pace. For 22 years, she was Jessica Griffin Harris on “As the World Turns” … for 21 years, she was Dr. Melinda Warner in primetime on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” … and for nine of those years, she was both.
During part of that busiest stretch, she was also on Broadway, playing Caesar’s wife in “Julius Casear.” One frigid February day, she did the soap and the play and a post-midnight “SVU” outdoor scene. “I did three different jobs in 24 hours. Only in New York can you do that.”
Now she has to settle for one, working in Georgia. “Atlanta is just such a fertile ground” for film production, producer Sheila Ducksworth said.
Ducksworth is a Yale grad who had previously headed media divisions for Susanne Daniels, Tracey Edmonds and Will Packer. In October of 2020, she was put in charge of a new unit linking CBS and the NAACP.
Now, four-and-a-half years later, she’s achieving one of her main goals – an upper-crust soap with Blacks as the central character.
She chose Val Jean – in her 44th year of writing and producing soaps – to create it. This is, she said, the first soap to be produced by two Black women.
And yes, Val Jean said, it will seem fresh. “It’s messy Black people – not quite what you’ve seen before.”