I do not have a master’s degree. If I did, though, it would definitely be in Pop Culture Wackiness with a concentration in 1980s-‘90s entertainment. My fieldwork began as a mere child in the den of my grandparents’ Prince George’s County home, where I gathered my research for my would-be thesis, “Shh, Girl, My Stories Are On.”

My finely honed expertise gives me specific insight into CBS’s “Beyond The Gates,” the first new daytime soap opera on network TV in more than 25 years. The series, which premiered Monday, follows a super-rich Black family who run the well-manicured streets of Fairmont Crest, a fictitious Maryland gated community almost certainly set in Prince George’s County. Fairmont Crest shares the county’s significant concentration of Black wealth and Washington, D.C.-adjacent bougieness, and also sounds a lot like Fairmount Heights, the much more modest real-life town where my mom grew up.

I was raised down the parkway in Baltimore, but Prince George’s, where most of my family is from, feels like my ancestral home. We were not rich but I have spent a lot of time in gated communities there, rubbing the occasional shoulder with powerful figures who had perfect hair and more money than me.

“Beyond the Gates,” created by longtime daytime writer Michele Val Jean, stars former soap and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” veteran Tamra Tunie and “Amen‘s” Clifton Davis as Anita and Vernon Dupree, the cornerstones of an impressive and scandalous family. It hits all of my soapy buttons: Gorgeous clothes. Scenery-chewing overacting that’s as big as the homes. Rich, pretty people whose wealth and status can’t hide their messiness.

Money typically defines the arcs of traditional soap opera characters: those who have a lot of it, those who don’t but are perfectly content with their working-class existence, and those who would lie, cheat and steal to get it, even if it means lying about stealing your cheating husband.

Which is part of the reason why the filthy rich Anita, an award-winning former girl group singer, and Vernon, a former U.S. Senator, fascinate me. When I was growing up, the few Black characters who showed up on soaps were usually humble police officers or maybe doctors or lawyers, although they tended to have specific backgrounds of struggle.

Tunie told The Washington Post that when “As the World Turns” took viewers to the Brooklyn neighborhood that her character, hard-charging attorney Jessica Griffin, grew up in, they literally painted roaches on the set walls as if that was naturally how Black people lived. Like, it just made sense that Jessica, her law degree and her roach-free life were an aberration, so they assumed a poor, dirty background for her because they couldn’t imagine she’d come from anywhere else.

Ugh.

I grew up experiencing the ugly stereotypes and assumptions surrounding Black families and what they could or could not aspire to, even in fiction. I remember reading opinions that “The Cosby Show” was unrealistic because of its portrayal of a professional Black couple with a gorgeous Brooklyn townhome and equally gorgeous kids. Yes, the Huxtables were not your average Black family, but they were much closer to my family and those of a lot of my friends than “Good Times.”

Meanwhile, white people got to fantasize about the private planes and mansion lifestyles of the Carringtons on “Dynasty” and the Ewing clan on “Dallas.” It’s OK for other people to imagine having maids and butlers, but Black people with law degrees are fairy folk? Get out of here.

That’s why the Duprees, their fabulous clothes and willingness to elegantly smack a wench if necessary, make sense: they live in a world that actually exists, where wealthy Black people are not unicorns. Should people ever be this rich? Probably not, and certainly the current American reality is a real-time referendum on the obscenity of excess. Still, if the Newmans of “The Young and The Restless” and the Quartermaines on “General Hospital” get to glower over expensive wine in their corporate offices, I’m not mad at the Duprees being loaded as well.

The Duprees are the spiritual grandchildren of Dominique Deveraux, the gloriously imperious “Dynasty” diva played by the late Diahann Caroll. Miss Deveraux was not interested in realism, humility or tolerating your burnt champagne and wack caviar for any longer than she had to. She was a rebuke to the idea that gleeful fur-lined barbfests are too lofty a thing for people who look like me. “The Real Housewives of Potomac” would not exist without her. (Karen Huger, a beleagured star on that Bravo show, even has a cameo.)

So is “Beyond the Gates” any good? The first episode was very necessarily exposition-heavy to establish each character, so there’s a lot of word-heavy sentences like, “I can’t believe that friend of my daughter’s that we let live with us stole my husband, is getting married in our country club this week and is moving into our neighborhood!” The word “hussy” is used without irony. The aforementioned hussy gets slapped publicly. The hair is hairing.

It’s all frothy and ridiculous. But that’s why I’m now making sure I’m recording “Beyond The Gates” daily. Anita and Vernon have heft, and even Civil Rights Movement cred, apparently having met at the legendary March on Washington. But they aren’t here to be role models. They’re here to oversee fictional messiness that’s familiar enough to me to be relatable while so silly and big that I can dissociate from our current real-life dumpster fire.

As long as nobody’s trying to slap me, let’s pop open the non-burnt champagne and do this bougie thing.