The First New US Daytime Drama, Beyond the Gates, Premieres Tomorrow!

The Daytime Drama, formerly a leading source of revenue for television, has suffered a prolonged demise in the United States. Starting in the early aughts, and running into the early 2010s, Daytime Dramas were removed from the schedules of their former network homes with a seemingly agenda driven level of precision. While longstanding series being removed from the air was not unheard of, with Edge of Night and Search for Tomorrow both ending in the 1980s, and Another World bowing out in the 1990s (I’m not ignoring Ryan’s Hope, Santa Barbara, Loving, Generations, and other series that came and went mind you, but the aforementioned series had over 20 year runs), the 21st Century saw four series with 40-plus year runs come to a close: Guiding Light, As the World Turns, All My Children and One Life to Live within something like a 5 year span of time. It did not seem like there would be a new Daytime Drama that would ever come to network television.

And yet… there will be! Tomorrow, February 24th, 2025, will see the premiere of Beyond the Gates on CBS! Merely getting announced was a surprise, but the simple announcement is not the only surprise that the series cooked up. It is created by Michele Val Jean, a longtime veteran of the genre and the first woman of color female Head Writer of General Hospital. It focuses a family of color, for the first time since Generations. Women of color, particularly black women, make up a significant, if not majority, of the audience of Daytime Dramas, yet they have never been serviced in front of, or behind, the camera for their dedication. Beyond the Gates looks to remedy that!

The cast includes Daytime Veterans. Tamara Tunie will play the matriarch of the core family, and is known to soap audiences for her long tenure as Jessica Griffin on As the World Turns. Karla Mosley and Daphnee Duplaix will play Tamara’s daughters, and both have a history within the genre. Karla played Maya Avant-Forrester on the Bold and Beautiful, a transwoman who married into the show’s core family, while Daphnee was involved in the… infamous… Valerie/Vincent story on Passions, playing the female facing aspect of a hermaphrodite serial killer (look… Passions was a special breed of crazy, I’m just trying to promote Beyond the Gates while reporting facts, go try and contact James E. Reilly on a Ouija board if you want to have a go at someone for that debacle). Daphnee would have a shorter stint as Rachel Gannon on One Life to Live as well.

CBS has posted some video clips about the series and how it came to be, which can be seen below and underneath the cut (they’re all over 20 minutes in length, just so you know). Will Beyond the Gates be a success? Time will tell. But I’ll be watching!

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