Visiting the set of CBS' 'Beyond the Gates' to see the future of soap operas

Why would a Black-centered soap be the first result of a production partnership between CBS and the NAACP?

When you visit the set of a TV show as a reporter, there is often a lot of waiting involved.

The actual scenes you’re watching are often not that exciting. And without a script, which you rarely get, it’s tough to even know the significance of what you’re seeing. So you wait around, watching what often seems like routine work, until something breaks the routine in an amazing way.

My favorite moments: Seeing a hyper-realistic looking fake arm in a tray while hanging on the set of NBC’s medical drama ER, only to be told offhandedly by the prop guy that a pivotal character was going to have his arm cut off in a tragic helicopter accident (the publicist on set freaked out at having a journalist learn that closely guarded plot point months before it would air).

Watching castmembers of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 tensely work through a difficult scene that ended when one actor stormed off the soundstage for lunch, only to walk across a street to watch filming of a then-new series, Star Trek: Voyager, where the cast hadn’t gotten sick of each other and they were loving the episode’s director, Star Trek: The Next Generation alum LeVar Burton.

Visits to the sets of Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Law & Order also loom large in my memory. In fact, one of my favorite stories from a TV soundstage was this feature for the Tampa Bay Times about John Fiore, who played the supporting character Profaci on Law & Order.

At a time when Jerry Orbach was alive, co-star Benjamin Bratt was dating Julia Roberts and Carey Lowell was involved with Richard Gere, I was most fascinated by this journeyman actor who commuted in from Massachusetts to play the guy who was always handing over a fingerprint report or citing the results of a background check to keep the story humming along.

I write all of this just to set up a story about a different set visit: Two trips I made to the Atlanta set of Beyond the Gates -- the first soap opera created for network television in 25 years and the only hourlong broadcast soap starring a Black family. Ever.

(Beyond the Gates stars Clifton Davis and Tamara Tunie)

Click here to read my story for NPR.org on the show, which features lots of details on how they built a program which would feature 40 characters producing an hour of television every day. In some ways, the machine they built to crank it out is the exact opposite of what we see in the streaming age, where there are two-year stretches between seasons of TV shows with only 10 or 12 episodes in a single season.

When I first stopped by the set in December, stars Clifton Davis and Tamara Tunie weren’t around. And the production was still trying to ramp up the amount of script pages they could film in a day, shooting for 80 to 100 pages daily by the time they really iron out the kinks. (By comparison, the script for Pulp Fiction -- a movie which had, arguably, three different sets of characters and lasted two and half hours – was 126 pages.)

It seemed, at times, like the camera operators and sound technicians were rehearsing as much as the actors were, figuring out how to choreograph four different cameras and sprawling boom microphones to navigate a tight space and keep intrusive shadows from ruining the shots.

Admittedly, I was a little surprised when I heard the first show created by a partnership between CBS and the civil rights advocacy group the NAACP would be a daytime soap. But the fact is, Black people and Black culture has always embraced soap operas, watching traditional television much more than white viewers.

For younger viewers, reality TV shows like the Real Housewives series are their soap operas. But CBS and the NAACP are betting there is an audience of older viewers – especially Black women, who make the economic decisions in their households – who will enjoy watching a new soap opera focused on a type of character they haven’t seen often in fictional TV: wealthy, politically powerful Black professionals.

“Our head writer is African American and the writers room is predominantly Black, even though it is diverse,” Tunie told me, relaxing in her dressing room during my second visit to the set just a few weeks ago. “So when we get the scripts and the scripts actually sound like what would come out of our mouths? It is comforting and you don’t have to explain.”

When I started covering TV in 1997, broadcast networks valued young white male viewers highest – because, they said, those were the hardest viewers to get (I think it was because the ad buyers and network TV executives were mostly white males back then, and championed what made THEM want to watch TV). But now that viewership for traditional broadcast television has fallen with the advent of streaming, broadcasters can no longer afford to take their most loyal audiences for granted.

Whether this will work or not remains to be seen – maintaining a soap opera requires loads of resources and there is a reason why there are only three other such shows on network TV now.

But all involved seem to realize pulling off the show is a marathon, not a sprint. And they’re energized by the history they’re making as a show focused on Black characters at a time when so many people have been encouraged to question the value of elevating racial diversity and Black history.

“It almost brings tears to my eyes to see the number of African Americans who are playing pivotal roles in the production and to see so many folks at work behind the scenes,” Clifton Davis, who has appeared in everything from Hello Dolly on Broadway to TV series like Amen, Madam Secretary and Clipped, told me. “I’ve been around 50-plus-years in this business, and I got to tell you, when I first started, there were very few who looked like me. It warms my heart to see how far we’ve come.”