BEYOND THE GATES: All You Need to Know About Creator Michele Val Jean

Making its debut just in time for February sweeps, the fresh new sudser Beyond the Gates is set to air its first episode on CBS Daytime on February 24, 2025, and at the helm will be Michele Val Jean as the creator, executive producer, and showrunner.

Michele Val Jean and Beyond the Gates

Beyond the Gates will be the first soap to launch in the 21st century so far, as the last daytime serial to premiere was Passions, back in 1999. It's a definite reason for the soap world to celebrate, especially as, in the last dozen years, there have only been four serials remaining after the cancellations of As the World Turns, Guiding Light, All My Children, and One Life to Live, in 2009, 2010, 2011 (network), and 2012 (network), respectively.

If the name Michele Val Jean sounds familiar, it's not simply because she is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner for Beyond the Gates. Val Jean has been writing for television consistently for 35 years, getting her start penning two episodes of the prime-time crime drama Jake and the Fatman in 1990. That Gates is a soap focused primarily on African-American characters is more than a little bit of a full circle for Val Jean, whose first job writing for a soap opera was on Generations, the first-ever Black soap; she created 15 scripts for that show between 1990 and 1991.

Once Generations ended, Val Jean moved straight to NBC's Santa Barbara, where she wrote 285 episodes until that show ended in 1993. From there, she took her pen to General Hospital, staying on for 19 years; she was lauded for her 1998 storyline in which Luke and Laura Spencer revisited his 1979 rape of her, which, given the norms at the time of its original broadcast, had been romanticized. Val Jean also wrote scripts for GH spinoff Port Charles from 1997 to 1998. In 2000, Val Jean made history when she became the first African-American head writer of an American daytime soap.

By 2012, after 402 scripts for Port Charles' Quartermaine, Cassadine, and Spencer families, Val Jean took on the Forrester, Logan, and Spencer families in The Bold and the Beautiful's fictional Los Angeles, crafting 477 scripts for that show. During her run on B&B, Val Jean also served as consulting writer and producer on The Oprah Winfrey Network's prime-time serial Ambitions in 2019. Val Jean's last day writing for B&B was April 3, 2024, telling her fans on Facebook that it was “time for a change.”

Val Jean's thirty-plus-year tenure as a soap writer isn't the only cred she brings to Beyond the Gates. Over the years, she has won seven Daytime Emmys for her work, as well as netted TV Guide's Best Daytime Soap Writer trophy in 2004, 2006, and 2007. To create the new show, Val Jean teamed with the NAACP and CBS Studios, with NAACP Venture President Sheila Duckworth saying, “(Beyond) the Gates will be everything we love about daytime drama, from a new and fresh perspective. This series will salute an audience that has been traditionally underserved...with multi-dimensional characters, juicy storylines, and Black culture front and center.”

Val Jean has already written 75 episodes for the new show.

Beyond the Gates takes place in a posh Maryland suburb just outside of Washington D.C. and follows the exploits of the influential and sometimes intertwined Dupree, Richardson, Hamilton, and Hawthorne families. The soap, featuring daytime's first all-Black script-writing team, begins airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+ on Monday, February 24.