Beyond the Gates creator Michele Val Jean never thought anything would come of the work she’d done to conceptualize the world of Fairmont Crest. On the Tuesday, December 16 episode of the Soapy podcast, she shared with co-hosts Greg Rikaart and Rebecca Budig that she’d considered the Bible she was asked to create a “nice COVID project,” but it turned into the first new daytime drama in a quarter century.
Key Takeaways
- Why Michele Val Jean didn’t think BTG would get picked up
- The work that went into creating Fairmont Crest
- BTG’s set environment
Michele Val Jean on Bringing a New Soap Opera to Life
As the Rikaart-dubbed “Godmother of All Soap Operas” was dreaming up BTG, she was also working on B&B. Val Jean joked that she didn’t give up her day job, to which Rikaart and Budig laughingly agreed was a smart move. With BTG’s success, it’s hard to picture not putting all your eggs in one basket from the outset. But Val Jean is a veteran in a business that hadn’t launched a new soap opera on daytime since the late ’90s.
The industry has changed significantly since Passions debuted, to the point where creating a soap Bible has become a lost art form. Val Jean’s career is storied, particularly her work on General Hospital, where she’d worn many hats as a writer. However, being responsible for developing a soap opera from scratch to be pitched to series wasn’t in her wheelhouse. Nowadays, very few people have that experience under their belt. She explained the task set before her:
When I was on General Hospital, I did a little bit of everything. I was on the head writing team. I wrote outlines, and I wrote scripts, and I was a script editor. So, I sort of learned a lot there. But I had never written a Bible. Not many people have and there’s no real template for it anymore because there hasn’t been a new soap in so long.
I had to kind of figure out—one of the things Sheila [Ducksworth, BTG EP] and I talked about was that we didn’t want a huge document that nobody would read. I tried to figure out a way to tell who the people were, and what the stories were going to be, without it being 300 pages. That was kind of my challenge, and I said to Sheila when she approached me, “I don’t know how to do this,” and she said, “Yeah, you do. You just don’t know you do.”
Val Jean shared that by the time she was done, they were able to get BTG’s pitch down to 20 minutes. But the road to getting a pickup wasn’t a short one. Though the soap was shopped, it took three years to get a green light. She had thought, because she’d taken the project on during the pandemic, “Well, this is a nice COVID project. I can’t go anywhere so I might as well write this. I’ll never have to follow up on it because nobody’s going to do anything with it,” but, thankfully, that turned out not to be the case.
Creating Fairmont Crest
During the interview, Val Jean said that it has been gratifying to open the door to the world of the Duprees. Black actors have been standout performers in daytime, but this is still an industry where their characters are often the best friend or a part of families who aren’t permanent fixtures on a soap opera. BTG was an opportunity to have the main, story-driving family be Black and for their narratives to be central to the plot.
Val Jean approached world-building with an undoubtedly fun premise: “What if Diana Ross married John Lewis?” From that concept, Anita and Vernon Dupree were born. But it wasn’t just the writing that she had to lock down. Once the series was ordered, she had to assemble a writing team, and Val Jean knew immediately she wanted fellow former head writer of General Hospital, Robert Guza, Jr. to sign on.
I had an idea of who I wanted to work with just from being around for so long. I knew I wanted Bob Guza. In my office, I had put hand-written signs on a door that were sort of like manifestations. Like The Gates—that’s what we were calling it at first—The Gates 2024, or whatever it was, I want Guza. He was the first person that I wanted because I knew that he’d been a creator, he’d been a head writer, he’d been all these things that they were expecting me to be somehow. And I knew that he could help me. He could help me launch that show.
Beyond the Gates’ Set Feels Like Being With Family
But the experience of establishing BTG has also extended beyond the page and the screen. It includes the environment that is being fostered by the creative team. Budig shared that she has only heard good things about what it’s like to work on the soap and that they treat each other like family. While the cast and crew are based in Atlanta, the writing team is all over and meets on Zoom. Val Jean herself has only been to set twice, but those first three weeks of shooting were surreal for her. She shared:
To walk into that studio, and all these people are working. There are all these jobs that were created because of something that came out of my head. It was just so humbling. And everybody there was so happy to be there, so grateful. I feel so loved when I go there because everybody wants to hug and kiss me.
Seeing the world she created come to life was awe-inspiring for Val Jean. She told Rikaart and Budig that there was a moment during filming on the first episode where the Duprees were gathered together in the country club, and she thought, “There they all are, you know? There’s my babies.”
So what Val Jean thought was a project that would never see the light of day became a new era in a daytime soap world that had only seen cancellations over the past two decades. Hopefully, BTG won’t be the last series to debut in this genre, and more will follow.
Watch the full episode of the Soapy podcast, which features an additional interview with Emmy-award-winning costume designer Jeresa Featherstone:
