‘Beyond The Gates’: Meet Michele Val Jean, the Writer Who Created Daytime’s First Ever Black Soap Opera – Deadline

By Lynette Rice Senior TV Writer
When Sheila Ducksworth was named president of CBS’ new production partnership with the NAACP back in 2020, one of her first calls was to Michele Val Jean — a longtime writer on such soaps as The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital, and Generations, the first daytime drama to feature a Black family.
Duckworth’s dream was to do that again — but this time, the cast would feature predominantly Black actors. And she knew that Val Jean, a writer she had met previously through Generations star Vivica A. Fox, was the only soap veteran who could make it happen.
“Generations was special for me because it was the first time I saw more than two or three characters who looked more like me, who had more of a lifestyle that I could identify with and wanted to identify with,” Ducksworth tells Deadline. “And as it turned out, Michele was the only Black writer in the room. So when I moved out to California, I met Vivica and told her my dream to make a soap. And she said to me, ‘well, if you want to do that, there’s one person you have to meet. Michele Val Jean.’  There are certainly other very talented writers out there, but I didn’t even once consider them. It was always Michele.”

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Ahead of today’s premiere of Beyond the Gates (2 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT on CBS), Val Jean talks about how she went about crafting the first Black one-hour daytime drama to air on television and the first daytime drama to premiere since Passions in 1999. Val Jean is the creator, showrunner and executive producer; other EPs are Ducksworth, Robert Guza Jr., Julie Carruthers, Leon W. Russell, Derrick Johnson, Kimberly Doebereiner and Anna Saalfeld.
DEADLINE Talk about that conversation you had with Sheila.
MICHELE VAL JEAN I got the call while I was working on The Bold and the Beautiful. We go back like 20 years when we bonded over our love of soaps. I was introduced to her by Vivica. I had written a pilot for a nighttime show about a rich Black family in Beverly Hills. I kind of wrote it with Vivica in mind, and I gave her the script to read and she really liked it. Previously to that, Sheila had said something to Vivica about wanting to do a Black soap opera. And Vivica said, ‘well then you need to talk to Michele Val Jean.’ So she sent me to Sheila with the script, and Sheila really liked it, even though she couldn’t really do anything with it at that point in time. But she said, ‘we’re going to work together one day,’ and so here we are. When she got that presidency, she called and said ‘it’s time. We’re going to do that show we talked about.’ And I was like, I don’t know how to do that, because obviously I’d never created a soap opera before. I’d always walked into existing universes. She said, ‘yeah, you do. You just don’t know you do.’ So I wrote the bible, and at the same time I kept writing my scripts for The Bold and the Beautiful, and here we are four years later.

DEADLINE You’ve been working on soaps and in Hollywood for a very long time. What made you want to feel like you wanted to do this?
VAL JEAN Well, I mean, why not? I felt, first of all, I didn’t think anything would come of it. I figured it was because of Covid. Here’s a good Covid project I can do, to stretch some muscles, and it’ll go away. I’ll make some money and keep my day job. I’ll write this bible, I’ll turn it in, and that’s the last I’ll ever hear of it.
DEADLINE What made you think it wasn’t going to happen?
VAL JEAN Networks aren’t green lighting soaps anymore. They cancel them now. So I did not see a universe in which a new soap opera would be greenlit. And then all of a sudden it seemed like out of nowhere I got the call that we were greenlit and we were going,
DEADLINE Is there a certain checklist to follow when creating a soap opera?
VAL JEAN Well, you need a family. You need a foundation. I wanted the family to be messy, but really grounded in their love for each other. You need a wild child, somebody who’s unpredictable, a heroine, a wish fulfillment heroine where you look at her and go, ‘I want to be her because she has no filter.’ You have to have your stable character, you have to have your villains, you have to have your hot guys. And then I wanted it to be multi-generational. So it’s the matriarch and the patriarch, their two daughters, their families. You need a cop, you need a lawyer.
DEADLINE The family has to be rich, right?
VAL JEAN Yeah. I wanted a rich Black family. I don’t like downtrodden Black characters. I like them to be pretty and I want ’em to be messy. I just wanted to make a show about elegance, that was beautiful to look at. And this certainly is that. It is beautiful to look at, and the actors are phenomenal. The clothes are incredible. The hair is beautiful. It’s like we haven’t seen this kind of representation, certainly not in daytime before.
DEADLINE This is 2025, though. Do those rules still apply when creating a soap?
VAL JEAN They do. I think some soap opera rules are forever, and I think those kinds of characters are necessary to keep the drama moving.
DEADLINE Who are you trying to appeal to with Beyond the Gates?
VAL JEAN Everybody. It’s different today because I came from that generational watching of soap operas, my grandmother, my mother and me. But there was only one way to watch ’em. You sat in front of the television when they were on and you watched them like that. Now there are a lot of options. You can DVR them, you can watch ’em on streaming. But one of the reasons why I wanted this to be generational was because I want everybody to watch. I want everybody to see a little bit of themselves in there and find a reason to tune in and stay with us. One of our characters is a social media influencer. She’s a reluctant model, but she’s got millions and millions of followers. We play with that whole social media thing. Hoping that’ll appeal to younger viewers. Drama is still drama. I mean, soaps are still about wish fulfillment and high drama and high stakes, bigger than life characters. So I don’t think that’s changed very much. It’s a formula that works.
DEADLINE Are you a unicorn in the daytime world? Are there a lot of women of color like yourself with the amount of power that you have with the experience that you have?

VAL JEAN No. For the experience and the years put in? Yeah, I think I am. I can’t think of anybody. I mean, there are certainly other Black women writers out there. I’ve corralled a whole team of Black writers. I’ve been writing soaps consistently for over 30 years, so I can’t think of another Black person who has done that, who can say that. There are 15 of us in the room. I have more [than other soaps]. It’s wonderful. I have my co-head writer who’s Bob Guza, along with five breakdown writers, five script writers, a script editor, a writer’s assistant, and a continuity producer.
DEADLINE So you were really the only person who could do this.
VAL JEAN That’s what Sheila said!
DEADLINE How does that feel?
VAL JEAN It’s hard to wrap my head around all of this, from a little girl asking my grandmother what happened on General Hospital the day before to having created the first hour-long, Black soap opera. And it’s not just Black. We say that a lot, but it’s very diverse. We have white people and we have Latinos. So it is diverse. How does it feel? It feels amazing. We have a diner on the show, and it’s retro sixties. It’s got the red vinyl booths and the jukebox and everything. I named it after my mother. It’s called Jean’s Soul Kitchen, because my mother didn’t live to see me do any of this. She never knew that I ended up writing soaps. So now as long as my show is on the air, her spirit is right there. So to be able to do that, it means the world to me.
DEADLINE Where did you find those writers? Were they already on soaps? Are you giving new people a chance?
VAL JEAN I’ve worked with or knew of all of them. I basically handpicked the team. Everybody’s been on soaps before.
DEADLINE You’re launching right at a time when President Trump has declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. How does that make you feel?
VAL JEAN It’s scary, but it’s like I have to keep my head in the show. I have to keep my head Beyond the Gates. I can’t be distracted by the noise from outside because it is too much work and I have to stay in a certain frame of mind to be able to generate. It’s different up here in the boss’s office. It is not just like, ‘I’ll write my script and then I’ll have two days to doom scroll’. I have to keep my head in this job.
DEADLINE What kind of hours are you putting in?
VAL JEAN I haven’t read a book since September, and reading is my favorite thing to do. It’s all day, weekends, everything, this show. I’m in Los Angeles. We do our writers room virtually.
DEADLINE How many episodes ahead of time are you shooting?
VAL JEAN Let’s see. We’re writing episode 118. So we’re working maybe two months ahead of time.
DEADLINE So is there a huge cliffhanger at the end of week one?
VAL JEAN There’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens in that first week that culminates in a Big Friday tag.
DEADLINE It feels like a lot of people are rooting for you.
VAL JEAN It does feel like that. I feel it on social media with the fans, and I feel it in the daytime community. I mean, the daytime community has been so excited and so supportive, because this is great for our genre. When I was at the Daytime Emmys, I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and just said, ‘this is so wonderful, and we’re so proud and we’re so happy and we’re thrilled, and we can’t wait to watch it.’ And Brad Bell has been so supportive of this whole thing from the very beginning, and it warms my heart. I love, love my daytime community.Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.Signup for Breaking News Alerts & Newsletters
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Source: http://deadline.com/2025/02/beyond-the-gates-michele-val-jean-creator-cbs-daytime-drama-1236297452/