The latest installment of Beyond the Gates not only outstrips Hollywood’s most recent race-themed movies (the hit Sinners and the flop Highest 2 Lowest) but provides insight into the unfathomable, otherwise-hidden fantasies of the Democratic Party’s faithful black voting bloc.

This political observation is an aftereffect of the daytime series being an unprecedented collaboration between the liberal CBS network and the NAACP — a first for the open, possibly conspiratorial alliance between a media and political organization. How the games of propaganda and persuasion converge in showbiz programming is fully apparent in intertwined storylines that reflect contemporary issues.

Beyond the Gates isn’t about the border invasion, the tariff or inflation economy, or the cold civil war between political branches and the local judiciary, but those concerns are reflected in the personal lives of its central characters, the Dupree family — who are also dealing with marital infidelity, family relations, professional conflicts, and the usual stuff of soap operas. But when all that Sturm und Drang happens to folk blithely enjoying ethnic social privilege, the result is a vision of American unconsciousness — truths that Ryan Coogler and Spike Lee hide behind genre contrivance.

Here, Millennial American strivers are unexpectedly stripped bare. Although they dress in haute couture, constantly refer to a history of overcoming oppression, and just as constantly admit their fear of being swallowed up by “the system,” they move toward inescapable destinies. This week, the bourgeois Duprees are challenged by a ghetto arriviste (Trisha Mann-Grant’s Dana Leslie Thomas) suddenly endowed by a surprising family connection, and a stalker (Brianna Roberts’s Alison kidnaps RhonniRose Mantilla as Chelsea, the clan’s darling lesbian granddaughter). Both plots unsettle the family’s self-confidence, pride, and sexual sophistication.

It’s uncertain if the ruthless Duprees — the show’s powerful black Washingtonian family — are meant to be heroes. They may speak the latest slang and the oldest bromides (plus new ones like “Mistakes don’t make you”), yet they are ruthless when forced to answer for their sense of indomitability. Never before, from the black families in A Raisin in the Sun, Peyton Place, or Generations to Laurel Avenue, To Sleep with Anger, Cosby, or Black-ish, has American pop culture presented a group of black characters outside the social-services underclass or criminal world who are as cutthroat as they are certainly high-and-mighty.

Repeatedly setting themselves apart from the hoi polloi, the Duprees flaunt their status as enviable media celebrities — models and fashion influencers, an entertainment matriarch, a former senator patriarch, a local cop, a lawyer who is the family fixer, and a gay congressman campaigning for president. Surely the show’s producers and writers are aware of real-life parallels and play on apparent analogies. This makes Beyond the Gates notable and amusing.

It’s also more credible than opinion polls. Melodrama uncovers the hidden but recognizable truths that analytical aggregator institutions can’t perceive and never divulge. By previously suggesting that CBS and NAACP may have painted themselves into a corner, my point is that this show interrogates their usual diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) patterns — perhaps inadvertently.

Watching the Duprees step in and out of dignity/meanness, righteousness/snobbery, fairness/selfishness is enlightening — not so dispiriting as when official public figures betray our expectations inexcusably. We’re left bewildered or made to think the worst — as when politicians such as Bennie Thompson, Jim Clyburn, Wes Moore, and Brandon Johnson repeat the NAACP/Democratic Party line despite social circumstances having changed since the civil rights era, the haunted past that the powerful, wealthy Duprees have escaped.

Hollywood high-rollers Spike Lee, Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, Ava DuVernay, and Tyler Perry don’t dare explore the fatal attraction of so many black voters to the Democrats, but it’s implicit in everything the Duprees do — and that is the subliminal meaning of the latest twists in this soap opera. Viewers must contemplate whether any independent black leadership has occurred since the Jim Crow fears that liberal demagogues keep trying to revive. CBS and NAACP are the guiltiest of such institutions, yet Beyond the Gates cracks their own codes of political autonomy. (Prime mover Obama went unmentioned until episode 120.) The show goes beyond mere representation and “looks-like-me” tokenism. It allows us to observe the Duprees and their antagonists as people — sometimes without obvious institutional endorsement and without pretense to high art. This peek inside is the closest view we’ll get at how moving-on-up black families operate. It updates NAACP mythology and should be as familiar as that of the Godfather movies.