Why buzzy new soap ‘Beyond the Gates’ isn’t eligible at the 2025 Daytime Emmys, how the number of contenders is determined, and more burning questions answered

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Rachel Schwartz is the first female Head of the Daytime Emmys and Children's & Family Emmys, and she has a rich history with Gold Derby. "I was one of the original forum moderators back in early 2000," she tells us. "It's always great to talk to people who are into the nitty-gritty like we are."

With the 2025 Daytime Emmy nominations scheduled to be rolled out beginning tonight (the first eight categories) and tomorrow morning (the rest of the races), Schwartz sat down with Gold Derby to dish exclusive details as well as inside-baseball information that only true awards aficionados would appreciate. The Daytime Emmys are bestowed annually by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).

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First things first, the awards boss wants fans of Beyond the Gates, the buzzy new soap opera that has been airing on CBS since February, to know why it won't be receiving any nominations on Thursday morning. "They weren’t eligible this year only because our eligibility window is calendar year," she says, "but we are looking forward to their participation next year" at the 2026 Daytime Emmys. Beyond the Gates is the first new network soap to featuring a predominantly Black cast in 35 years, and the first new network soap of any kind in 25 years.

Daytime Emmys head Rachel SchwartzNATAS

Some years the main Best Drama Series category has only three nominees, while other years it's four, five, or — in the case of 2024 and 1989 — six. So, what gives? Schwartz won't reveal the number of submissions in any year due to a NATAS policy that guarantees "equity for the submitters and for the communities we serve." However, she does reveal that "last year, there were six nominees due to a difference in the rules then versus now."

She explains: "Last year, entrants into that category were divided into 'subcategories' of A and B dependent on their number of episodes — subcategory A was 52 or more episodes per year, and subcategory B was 51 or less episodes per year. The content was all judged together, but the scoring allowed for up to five nominees from each subcategory to be nominated. So, what you saw last year was a mixture of programming from each of the subcategories. We eliminated that division this year for a number of reasons. We do allow both types of programming to enter there, but the nominees will just be the highest-scoring entries."

Another rule that was applied with "greater detail" this year by the National Awards Committee (NAC) is categories not nominating more than 50 percent of the total entries. Schwartz details, "This is similar to what Primetime does with their nomination counts being proportional to their number of entries. Up until this year, the NAC applied expansions to oversubscribed categories but rarely decreased the number of nominees in undersubscribed categories. This application has been something the NAC has been doing, and will continue doing, to all categories in all of our Emmys competitions."

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Refuting speculation that anyone who submits receives an automatic nomination, the Schwartz says, "We believe the Emmy is the highest standard of achievement in the television industry and therefore the standard for nomination should be higher than just being able to submit."

Asked about the decline of daytime dramas, Schwartz concedes, "There used to be a lot more soaps on the air, and I think the reduction in numbers has had several key factors. First is that they were created as programming for women who were ostensibly home all day. That has not been the case by and large for many decades. Streaming has changed the way we collectively view content. People are much more used to the binging model, where you can get through a whole program in a few days, instead of something where you are invested day in and day out all year round."

She suspects that "the soap is ripe for a resurgence," and viewers are seeing that right now with Beyond the Gates. "The success of things like The Bold and The Beautiful on the Paramount+ platform and Days of Our Lives in its full move to Peacock also show how successful this format can be without a traditional linear network. I think we are going to see some of the most creative minds and soap lovers in the country coming up with ways to reinvent the genre. Perhaps it’s not necessarily daily, or perhaps the episode lengths are different, or perhaps the episodes are released in blocks ... who knows?"

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