Inside a soundstage at Assembly Studios in Doraville, the cameras keep rolling on what its executive producer calls a six-year bet that daytime soap operas still have an audience, and a future.
“Beyond the Gates,” the CBS daytime drama centered on the wealthy, multigenerational Black Dupree family, is shooting seven episodes a week on the studio lot just outside Atlanta, the first network soap opera to be produced in the city. The show, born from a 2020 partnership between CBS Studios and the NAACP, has grown from a pitch made in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic into broadcast television’s only new daytime drama of the 21st century.
“Soap operas were going the way of the dinosaurs,” said Sheila Ducksworth, the show’s executive producer and president of the CBS Studios/NAACP Venture, during a set visit. She described the Duprees as “the Black Kennedys, so to speak,” a multigenerational family whose wealth and standing anchor the series’ fictional gated community outside Washington, D.C…