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The soap’s Creator, Head Writer, and one of the Executive Producers, Michele Val Jean, recently spoke to TV Insider, revealing how her ‘vision’ became reality.
Michele Val Jean’s Legacy In Soaps
Val Jean has a very long list of soaps she’s written for in the past, including General Hospital (GH), The Bold and the Beautiful (B&B), as well as Generations.
While talking to TV Insider, she notes she has been working on BTG for decades now and credits Sheila Duckworth, BTG executive producer and president of CBS Studios/NAACP Venture for transforming her idea into sudsy reality.
Val Jean states that the beginnings of this project originated 20 years ago when she met Ducksworth through actress Vivica A. Fox.
She goes on to say she, “… created a nighttime pilot about a rich Black family, and Sheila read it, and she really liked it, and she said, ‘You know, I can’t do anything with this right now, but you and I are going to work together one day.’”
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Fast forward some years later, and Duckworth became president of the CBS/NAACP Venture when she called Val Jean and revealed that the time was now to press the button on the show.
Val Jean replied, “You know, I’m not sure I know how to do that,” and Ducksworth stated, “Yeah, you do. You just don’t know you do.”
Sheila Ducksworth’s Excitement
Ducksworth reached out around the time of the pandemic, and since soaps had been canceled due to lockdowns, Val Jean just thought that this would be a nice “COVID project”.
Meanwhile, Ducksworth told TV Insider that she was excited about BTG from the moment Val Jean pitched the idea all those years ago. Ducksworth states that what she loved most about it is that it was, “real and authentic.”
AMP in the post
She goes on to explain, “… many people don’t know that the DMV area — Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia — is one of the most affluent areas for Black Americans in the entire country.”
Duckworth states, “… it’s a place where many Black Americans are living in gated communities, on big, park-like grounds. I’m not a writer. That is Michele, writer, and creator. But the idea of a big sprawling Black family, in this area in the DMV where we could explore the upstairs and the downstairs of it all, and have it be really real and authentic and something that people can check the demographics and say, ‘This exists,’ was important in that regard.”
She also notes, “And yes, Michele was the only person that I really felt could capture that world, and she did it in a huge way.”
Fans can tune into BTG’s very first episode on CBS this Monday, February 24, at 2 p.m. ET.
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