Now that the daily afternoon-TV melodrama is funded more by pharma ads than soap ads, a new term is needed. Not “The Soaps” and not “The Drugs” (which might apply to the self-serving lies Oprah instituted as “speaking one’s truth”), but something closer to the awareness gained by new social and cultural experience.
Call it Beyond the Gates, a surprisingly entertaining and challenging show borne of an unprecedented alliance between the CBS broadcasting network, Procter & Gamble, and the NAACP.
The traditional soap opera’s patriarch-and-matriarch format here focuses on a family of black overachievers, the Duprees. Former Senator Vernon Dupree (Clifton Davis) and his wife Anita (Tamara Tunie), a retired pop-music diva, live in Fairmont Crest, one of the gated communities of the tri-state area known as DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia). They embody a nexus of black American upward mobility, including their middle-class progeny, psychotherapist Nicole (Daphnée Duplaix) and supermodel Dani (Karla Mosley). Their ambition and success, after hardscrabble beginnings, are precarious, thus lotsa drama.
Beyond the Gates notably confounds representations of showbiz and political elites who pledge themselves to wokeness and entertainment and who model behavior that satisfies environmental, social, governance (ESG) scores for the CBS/Paramount network.
According to the LA Times, after George Floyd’s death “rocked” Hollywood, of all the industry “efforts to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, one stood out.” In the spring of 2023, CBS Television Studios began its unprecedented alliance with the NAACP. George Cheeks, the president of CBS Entertainment Group, approved a pact with Derrick Johnson, the CEO and president of the NAACP. Cheeks confirmed, “There is no better partner than the NAACP — the preeminent civil rights organization in our country — to help us find, develop and tell these inclusive stories.”
An all-female production team — Sheila Ducksworth, the executive producer and president of NAACP Venture (a production partnership between the NAACP and CBS), and Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, the executive VP of Entertainment, Diversity, and Inclusion, West Coast, at Paramount Global — brought on showrunner Michele Val Jean, past writer of the General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful series, to create Beyond the Gates as the first network soap opera in 25 years, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Last February’s premiere was preceded by a week of behind-the-scenes specials emphasizing its woke presentation (fashion and décor by prominent black designers and artists), plus Val Jean’s use of current vernacular language and topical references. Yet beneath this surface relevance, the show’s grand narrative submits its characters — and its audience — to timely and bewildering complexities of urban black America.
This is how NAACP sponsorship becomes questionable in pop entertainment (and more proof that CBS is the most calculating and untrustworthy network). Numerous daytime-TV shows offer Oprah-esque motivational confessions or are therapy targeted at black women. Beyond the Gates isn’t so blatant, just as the typology of its multihued cast avoids the colorism of Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) and improves on Tyler Perry’s class-based junk.
Representing the old-guard generation of the civil rights era, the Duprees soft-sell the patronization of most movies and primetime television that manipulate leaders of the racial-justice movement — whether Elijah Cummings, John Lewis, or Aretha Franklin. (Figures such as Kweisi Mfume, Bennie Johnson, Jim Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton, as well as Maxine Waters, Jasmine Crockett, Ayanna Pressley, and Val Demings are recognizable in the roman à clef narrative.) However, Vernon the senator and Anita the pop star certainly evoke that breed of career politicians and 1970s activists who currently betray the ideals and standards of their heyday.
While the older Duprees anchor the story, the second generation’s psychoanalyst/supermodel contrast (sedate Nicole and flamboyant Dani) alongside a third generation of token gays and estranged children provide the show’s clickbait. The Duprees are not churchgoers but country club standard-bearers, distant from Black Lives Matter radicalism. Val Jean and Ducksworth seem savvy enough to realize how conflicted black American success has become — despite the prominence of black-politicos-as-celebs.
Compare Mike Leigh’s cinema (the leading domestic melodrama for the past three decades since his 1996 interracial drama Secrets and Lies). Perhaps the public resisted his recent Hard Truths because its dramatization of conflicting principles — content-of-character versus color-of-skin — is at odds with the phony racial reckoning of the post-Obama era. Leigh’s black alienation got hilariously, often scarily, intimate. So is Senator Dupree, who speaks platitudes to police and family members, while Anita, haughty even to her kinfolk, displays conceits that hint at the legend of Motown’s Diana Ross and the Supremes. Anita’s pop group was named, significantly, The Articulettes.
Val Jean explores issues of “black royalty” — egotism based in ethnic-group status. Both Vernon and Anita initiate cover-ups (darker than mere infidelity) meant to sustain political status and vanity whatever the cost to family unity and emotional stability. (“It’s not noble,” high-minded Nicole assails her mother. “It’s disgusting!”)
Beyond the Gates reveals what most Millennial black pop fails to realize: the fallible humanity of black people descended from slavery and civil rights struggle who are as envious of others, chagrined at blended families, as any human beings. Val Jean hasn’t written a political exposé exactly, although Beyond the Gates at its best challenges the secretiveness suspected of D.C., Hollywood, and Kalorama. The most entertaining characters are a ghetto mother-daughter team, Leslie and Eva (Trisha Mann-Grant and Ambyr Michelle), who trespass the Duprees’ bourgie enclave.
The “continuing story” format of soap operas — the double-take pauses that make viewers tune in day by day — both extends fascination and sparks our desire for emotional and moral clarity. Right now, Beyond the Gates’s ebb and flow reaches a peak — uncovering all-too-credible political and personal secrets that no other contemporary American melodrama can match. Sometimes in pop culture, advances come unexpectedly. CBS and the NAACP almost back themselves into a corner.