CBS and the NAACP’s agenda bend the media.
For all the “holding accountable” talk we hear, politicians and news media do it only selectively — and never, it seems, for the scoundrels we want to see nailed. The CBS and NAACP daytime soap opera Beyond the Gates is getting closer to satisfying that urge. More than the usual saga of generational adultery geared to housewives, this roman à clef about Beltway creatures of the DMV (the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area), where so many political operatives reside, takes us behind the headlines into the private lives of America’s sanctimonious protected class.
CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss may not realize that her news and entertainment divisions have stealthily merged, but Gates viewers can play “spot the celebrity” among the power brokers on the show who are regularly presented as paragons of virtue — specifically, of that popular cliché social change.
The Dupree family, headed by retired Senator Vernon Dupree (Clifton Davis) and his EGOT-winning wife Anita (Tamara Tunie), rule the DMV and its Fairmont Crest Country Club (more significantly than the pseudo-aristocratic, flamboyant tycoons the Ewings on Dallas). The twist is: the Duprees are post-Obama figures who personify the way black political access has achieved both progress and corruption.
In three of the concurrent storylines, the Duprees combat social-climbing arriviste Dana “Leslie” Thomas (Trisha Mann-Grant); an underworld gangster, Joey Armstrong (Jon Lindstrom); and big-time lawyer Bill Hamilton (Timon Kyle Durrett), who was the Duprees’ fixer and is anxious to rejoin the clan after divorcing their youngest daughter.
It is one of the key moments in contemporary pop culture when six-foot-five Bill Hamilton confesses the truth about his role in big and small political issues, including settling the Duprees’ involvement in covering up a roadside murder to aid a political campaign or getting a local agency to stop Leslie’s building permit. “I solve problems, that’s what I do,” Bill says. “I bend the world until it breaks my way.” That’s more political honesty than we get at most congressional hearings, which themselves often feel like unending soap operas.
Also exhilarating is Leslie’s throwing the Duprees’ hypocrisy back in their faces, telling the senator: “The classic Dupree shell game! Step right up, ladies and gentleman. Which cup is the truth under? Oh, Vernon Dupree is the master of the sleight of hand as he shuffles the cups, spins the truth, weaves his words and works his Dupree magic so none of you will know which way is up, see?” That “see?” is Leslie’s Real Housewives version of Edward G. Robinson’s old gangster movie taunt. Frequently dropping ghetto “ratchet” code phrases, she is the writers’ secret weapon.
Equally juicy (as in judicious) is Joey’s deriding Nicole Dupree (Daphnee Duplaix), the family’s haughty psychotherapist, about justifying her own midlife sexual liberation with her ex-husband’s best friend: “How dare you! Oh, spare me the outrage, Nicole. We all have our skeletons, I just don’t dress them up in my Sunday best and parade them around like saints. Your father built an empire by greasing palms and making deals and you sit there and look down on me. You’re just another Dupree baptized in the same selfish waters.”
Righteous confrontations are the sweet meat of daytime melodrama, and these conflicts offer compelling stand-ins for the accountability that never threatens our representatives in D.C. The show avoids getting into the weeds of political jostling between branches of government — those demonstrations of personality and character that fluctuate with each news cycle and contentious press conference. Yet by setting up the Duprees as dynastic figures — evoking the Kennedy, King, and Obama legacies — Beyond the Gates reveals how these people tick and gratifies popular suspicion about everything families like the Duprees are hiding.
Better than that, the antagonists of Beyond the Gates let us see Bill, Leslie, and Joey talk back to the high-and-mighty — something press gaggles only do to Republicans, claiming it’s “a matter of character.” CBS and the NAACP make it clear that the Duprees (referred to more than once as “black American royalty”) are surrogates for Democratic Party progressives.
Unlike the lurid sensationalism that was the specialty of prime-time TV producer Shonda Rhimes on Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder (shows so trashy they were essentially nonpolitical), Beyond the Gates maintains a moral compass. This is important, especially when movies like One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Weapons refuse to hold their characters’ integrity to account.
Beyond the Gates openly manifests the ideological operations of the CBS network through its collaboration with co-producers Procter & Gamble and the NAACP (its “Advancing Change” ads run constantly). They share an ideological agenda, but the soap opera’s wild cast of characters keeps track of what otherwise would be a hoax — and cracks it open.