Tamara Tunie is fronting a record-setting moment for Beyond the Gates, which has landed 15 Daytime Emmy nominations after arriving as the first new daytime soap on a major broadcast network since 1999. For Jasmine Burke, that turn is more than a headline: she earned a nomination for Outstanding Guest Performance in a Daytime Drama Series for playing June.
Burke said she signed on without awards expectations, and the nomination lands in a category that can change how a guest role is viewed inside daytime. Her reaction also tracks with the way the show has been built from the start — around a Black family, on CBS, at a time when new broadcast-network soaps had been absent for decades.
Jasmine Burke and June
Burke said she never knows when she will appear on Beyond the Gates. “I just receive scripts out the blue,” she said, adding, “I’m not a contract player, so I could receive a script or I could not.”
That uncertainty makes the nomination sharper, not softer. A guest performer without a locked-in run has to make every appearance count, and Burke said, “The fact that they’ve continued to write me in, I’m just grateful every time I receive that email.”
Burke also said she read about Beyond the Gates years before it aired and thought, “That’s going to be a hit; people are really starving out here for diverse stories in daytime.”
15 Daytime Emmy nominations
Beyond the Gates’ 15 Daytime Emmy nominations give the show an immediate awards footprint that most new soaps do not get to build. It is the second soap to feature a Black cast since Generations debuted in 1989 and ended in 1991, and it is the first soap designed completely around a Black family.
The nomination total matters because it moves the show from launch story to awards contender in one cycle. A new daytime series usually spends its first year proving it can hold an audience; here, the industry is already signaling broad recognition across categories before the show has even had much time to settle.
Burke’s own path helps explain the show’s reach. She said she had been told many times that she had to go to New York or L.A. to make it in entertainment, but she kept a different view of where her work would land: “I still had this deep sense that God gave me a talent, and he was going to make sure it reached the world some way, somehow.”
CBS and daytime history
Burke also pointed to CBS history, saying the network greenlit the first Black variety show with Clifton Davis and Melba Moore. That frame places Beyond the Gates inside a longer pattern of limited daytime opportunities, which makes the show’s current awards count feel less like an outlier than a correction.
Tamara Tunie’s Daytime Emmy presenter lineup role adds another layer to the show’s awards visibility, but the bigger business read is simpler: a soap that debuted into a long gap has already converted novelty into attention. For Burke, the recognition arrives with the same loose, unpredictable workflow she described from day one.
That is the real takeaway for daytime: Beyond the Gates did not just return a Black-centered soap to major-network television after 1999. It turned that setup into 15 Daytime Emmy nominations, and Burke’s guest nod shows the show is getting credit not only for existence, but for execution.
