CBS Boss George Cheeks on The Gates: "Daytime Soaps Over Index With Black Women"
CBS
CBS
George Cheeks, the president and CEO of CBS and chief content officer for news and sports at Paramount+, wants people to know they are all in for their upcoming sudser The Gates, thanks to Black women. In an interview with Vulture, Cheeks discussed viewership over at the Tiffany Network being slightly down due to the television season taking a hit because of dueling strikes with writers and actors.
Cheeks talked about CBS's plans to get back to being ratings king and also the upcoming daytime drama The Gates. Cheeks made it clear for detractors the show will hit television and wants it to replicate what life looks like with the show centered around wealthy Black families.
You recently announced that CBS was developing a new soap opera called The Gates that will focus on a Black family. It was sort of shocking, because soaps have been in decline for decades. Is this show actually something which has a chance of getting on the air, or are you still just thinking about the idea?
It’s super real. And just to give you a little bit of the backstory, when we hired Sheila Ducksworth to run the NAACP venture, she and I had multiple meetings talking about what different genres she was going to lean into, and we talked a lot about daytime. One of the things that the data made very clear to both of us is that daytime soap operas over index with Black women, and yet when you look at soap operas, it’s usually sort of a white-led family with supporting characters that reflect more of our society. So we just thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to flip that and make the core anchor family a Black family, and then make the other characters reflect more the broader scope of society?
She found this great writer, Michele Val Jean, who’s been in the soap opera space for 30 years. She came up with a pitch, and we loved it. We brought Procter & Gamble into it as well, because if there were going to be [product] integrations, we could do it more holistically and organically. All of that is to say, we did a lot of work on the front end to put this together. So while yes, it’s development, it’s accelerated development.
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When will The Gates air? Cheeks gave some insight on when it will debut.
When do you think you’d move forward with a formal greenlight then, and how long until it’s on the air?
The actual timeline and when we’re going to do it is still uncertain, because we want to get this right. I mean, there hasn’t been a new soap opera launch since I can’t even begin to tell you when. But we have great success with Bold and the Beautiful and Young and the Restless, and so we think we’re the right folks to be launching a new soap. I wish I could tell you more about exact timing, but we’re so focused on getting it right, and that will dictate when we’re ready to launch it.
Cheeks also revealed The Gates’ possible running time:
Is it more likely to be a half-hour show or an hour?
It’s been being developed as an hour, but I can’t say for sure. I don’t know yet.
