‘Beyond the Gates’: The First New Soap in 26 Years Is a Slap in the Face to Trump

The first scene of any soap opera is perhaps the hardest: How do you start a show that you hope will last for years and become embedded in viewers’ hearts and—by extension—TV schedules? What tone do you set? What’s the immediate, snap-to-it, watch-me-now-and-forever vision?

Beyond The Gates debuted on CBS on Monday with the sight of a limo driving in a fancy gated community in Maryland, its smooth progress accompanied by The Emotions’ hit “Best of My Love.” Next, we see daytime and theater doyenne Tamara Tunie, as glamorous matriarch Anita Dupree, in a shimmering trouser suit entering the plush interior of the Fairmont Crest Country Club. (One for soap fans of a certain vintage, is the name a nod to Falcon Crest?)

On the menu when Anita sat at her reserved table: breakfast with her family, plus a heaped plate of trouble, steaminess, and scandal, with sides of snark and loving counsel—then a sock-it-to-the-jaw punch and a Real Housewife cameo to end the first episode.

Beyond the Gates is both making history, and an emphatic statement in the present. It is the first predominantly Black-cast daytime soap opera since Generations in 1989, and it is the first daytime soap opera to debut since 1999. The genre has been in a prolonged, gruesome decline. Until Monday, there were only three left on network TV: The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful on CBS and General Hospital on ABC. Days of Our Lives is still going, but streaming on Peacock rather than a staple on NBC.

The fact of Beyond the Gates’ existence is heartening for those long used to soaps being replaced by talk and news shows. Indeed, Beyond the Gates replaced The Talk; whether it will reverse the trend and usher in a new generation of daytime dramas remains to be seen. But recall when there were 19 such shows scattered across the networks: One Life to Live, All My Children, As the World Turns, and Guiding Light among them. Television needs long-lost twins, reincarnations, demonic levitations, and serial-killer filled tropical islands back in its pre-primetime hours.

Beyond the Gates’ political and cultural presence holds a more acute significance. When the show was conceived, its makers could not have known President Trump would choose to demonize DEI, and make it central to so many policy initiatives and vituperative proclamations early in his second term. Without initially intending to, Beyond The Gates now stands as a daily rebuke to the Trump administration’s animus towards diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is all those things, front and center, proudly so.

CBS’ producing partner is the NAACP, and the multi-generational drama is led by a Black creative team, including creator Michele Val Jean and executive producer Sheila Ducksworth, the first ever Black women to take the helm of a daytime soap.

Tunie has said that both in front and behind the cameras, the show is “groundbreaking in what you see and what you don’t see.” While there are, and have been, Black characters on daytime dramas (Tunie herself is a soap veteran)—and wealthy like the Winters’ dynasty in The Young and the Restless—they have been in the numerical minority; in Beyond the Gates they are center stage: leaders, figureheads, do-ers, players, fabulously dressed, and extravagantly rich.

Politics and social progress are central to the show. Patriarch Vernon (Clifton Davis; like Tunie, a Broadway veteran) is a business mogul turned senator; we learned in this first episode Anita was a singer who he met on a civil rights march. The two radiate strength, conviction, and not-to-be-messed-with power. The show’s café setting outside the Gates, Orphey Gene’s—named in loving memory after Val Jean’s mom who loved soaps—is furnished with vintage activism and activist photographs provided by the NAACP.

In the first episode a café customer thanked Vernon for his work, and the inspirational presence of Anita—who was raised in the Chicago projects—and their family. The venue is also an homage to the Florida Avenue Grill in D.C., which proudly calls itself the oldest soul food restaurant in the world.

The soapier drama in the first episode principally erupted from the firecracker that is former model Dani Dupree (Karla Mosley), daughter of Anita and Vernon, furious that her ex-husband, shady lawyer Bill (Timon Kyle Durrett), had just announced that he was getting married to the much younger Hayley Lawson (Marquita Goings).

Not only this: They would be living in a neighboring house in Fairmont Crest, and the marriage was set to take place in the country club which Vernon’s father built in 1951. And of course there’s more! Hayley is the now former best friend of Dani’s daughter. (Mosley previously received plaudits playing Maya Avant, daytime television’s first transgender bride, in The Bold and the Beautiful—a storyline which won her and the show three deserved GLAAD awards.)

Dani quite naturally—after throwing two cups smashing against the wall before the chic opening credits—spent most of the first episode seething over Bill and Hayley, until Anita (nice touch: the casual aside that Anita is an EGOT winner) and Vernon, voices of sober reason and encouraging strength, made their daughter calm down.

Fortunately, for soap purposes, Dani’s serenity lasted milliseconds. The revelation of the impending country club marriage and neighboring home acquisition led to her punching Hayley. This was followed by a cameo by Karen Huger of The Real Housewives of Potomac, observing the chaos seated at the bar, and providing the closing line of the debut episode: “Welcome to Fairmont Crest!”

The wedding is set to take place later this week, and we all know how soap weddings go, especially given that Dani has sworn to get revenge on Bill and Hayley. And especially when Beyond the Gates wants to end its first week big.

Hayley may be a homewrecker, and was wearing leopard-print to signal it, but it was hard not to feel sorry for her as she faced not just Dani’s wrath, but also all the Duprees queuing up to give her the judgiest of judgy looks. She was described as “the poor little orphan girl” who the Duprees had once shown kindness too; her protests that she never meant to hurt anyone fell on deaf, betrayed ears.

Elsewhere, we met Dani’s sister Nicole (Daphnée Duplaix), an empathetic psychiatrist who judging by all the drama on day one, seems like she could be busy in Fairmont Crest. She’s happily married with two kids, and seemingly the sensible one, while her sister—as she rightly put it—was a “force of nature with no apologies.” As any soap fan knows, Nicole’s aura of drama-free Zen is itself a flashing neon sign presaging its own doom. Prediction: she’ll be an unhinged mass poisoner by this time next year.

Nicole is married to plastic surgeon Ted (Maurice Johnson), and we all know how vital plastic surgeons are to soap operas, ready to repair badly burned faces—especially when a character is about to be recast. One of their kids, Martin (Brandon Claybon), is a passionate congressman following in his grandfather’s footsteps (will his character be written, or rewritten, to meet this political moment?), the other, Kat (Colby Muhammad), seems a little more indolent and indulged (good on her!).

A family tree might help you keep track of who’s who in these early episodes. Chelsea (RhonniRose), Dani’s younger daughter, is a model and social media influencer, but wants to give it up—how, she wonders, can she tell her mom this when the latter is already losing it over Bill and Hayley?

Naomi (Arielle Prepetit), Dani and Bill’s older daughter—and formerly Hayley’s best friend until Hayley became her father’s fiancée!—is an attorney married to detective Jacob (Jibre Hordges); they spent much of the first episode shedding clothes and not getting to work on time. As well as b-----slaps and double-dealing, there will clearly be plenty of old-school “love in the afternoon” and hunks in their underwear in Beyond the Gates.

Still to appear: Trisha Mann-Grant as Dana “Leslie” Thomas who looks set to cause big-T trouble. Among the white characters in episode one: nurse Ashley (Jen Jacob), her husband Derek (Ben Gavin), who are friends of Naomi and Jacob, and gossipy real estate broker Vanessa (Lauren Buglioli), friend of Dani. Unseen so far: daytime veterans Jon Lindstrom and Cady McClain who have major roles. There may be crossover character visits from CBS’ other sudsers, Y&R and B&B, to help bolster the audience.

Beyond the Gates’ makers have also furnished the lore of the show with meaningful Easter eggs: Vernon’s father is named Paul Cheeks Dupree in a tribute to pioneering architect Paul Cheeks, the father of George Cheeks, co-CEO of Paramount Global and president and CEO of CBS. The Fairmont Crest coat of arms features a lantern to represent Harriet Tubman, the Maryland-born abolitionist, activist and military scout, and a donno, a West African drum.

Beyond the Gates’ first episode was inevitably a little heavy on exposition, as characters provided potted portraits of themselves and their histories. It’s going to take viewers a minute to get to know them, and for stories to grow around them; there are 20 full-time cast members, and 20 on contract and recurring.

Still, there were enough pointed references to past events to germinate a myriad of plots around, well who knows… long-lost family members, shady professional misdeeds, ex-lovers about to resurface, political intrigue, unknown-as-yet children, and come on, there has to be a body of some kind buried at the country club in the past or future. Meantime, this first week we await the grand disaster of Bill and Hayley’s wedding, and a second kind of DEI daytime soap fans will hope Beyond the Gates comes to excel in: Deliciously Exciting Insanity.