The showrunner and executive producer also talks about how Black Lives Matter informed her modern reimagining of the groundbreaking 1975 novel.

Mara Brock Akil reimagines Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever with a new Netflix series, streaming now.
Lovie Simone and newcomer Michael Cooper Jr. play Keisha and Justin, updated versions of Blume’s teenage loves Katherine and Michael.
Brock Akil talks how Black Lives Matter informed her fresh take and a potential season 2 after that bittersweet ending.

Just call Mara Brock Akil a realist.

By the end of Forever, the TV luminary’s modern reimagining of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel about the intensity of teenage love and sex, a different type of happily-ever-after takes shape: Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.), childhood classmates who reconnect during their senior year of high school, break up. The decision is painful, but mutual, as they look ahead. Keisha is bound for Howard University, while Justin defers from Northwestern to pursue music.

“What I love about the ending and the complexity is that love is intact,” Brock Akil tells Entertainment Weekly. “Though they broke up to go their separate ways to embrace more of who they are, they did it in love.” Should they ever seek each other out again, too, she adds, “It will be love. I’m really excited about young people showing all of us the way in terms of how to transition from relationships without it having to be destructive. We don’t need any more of that.”

Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr. in ‘Forever’.ELIZABETH MORRIS/Netflix

Above all, the question the series poses is: “Is it a forever love? Or the one you remember forever?”

Brock Akil, the TV veteran behind such cultural touchstones as Girlfriends and Being Mary Jane, is not usually one for adaptations. “But when you hear that Judy Blume is saying that her body of work can be reimagined, you raise your hand without thinking,” she quips. Her inner 12-year-old self, one of the many disciples who adhered to the gospel of Blume, did just that — though Forever was not initially up for option. “My understanding is [Blume] didn’t put it on the list because she thought that where teenage sexuality is in modern times just completely outpaced what the book was depicting,” Brock Akil recalls.

The novel is seminal for its honest depiction of teen sex and a young woman’s sexual awakening. It was also, at the time, the target of censorship and often banned as a result. “My daughter Randy asked for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die,” Blume wrote on her website, citing several other novels in the genre where girls are often punished for having sex. How does one retell the story in a sex-positive era, then? Love is a timeless theme, after all.

“We are always looking for, in every generation, love,” Brock Akil says. “Who can I love? Who loves me? How can I make healthy choices if it progresses to sex? Can I still aspire to my future? That is timeless. When we started talking about intimacy being one of the challenges of the modern era, that’s when our conversations opened up. Judy’s motivation for writing the book was for her own teenage daughter, and I’m now a mother raising a teenage son and I’m concerned and thoughtful about his navigation of sex.”

With the race-swap of the leads, Brock Akil paints a searing portrait of how Black kids come of age in white America. In one notable scene, Justin experiences an anxiety attack at the sight of a police cruiser while he’s behind the wheel. The series is set in 2019 Los Angeles, a year before the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement amid police killings of Black men and women. “For young women, we’re worried about pregnancy primarily disrupting our future,” Brock Akil says. “For a Black mother raising a Black boy, I’m most concerned with: Is he going to live in this modern era?”

Michael Cooper Jr. in ‘Forever’.Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Netflix

“Is he going to, because he wants to have sex, be deemed a threat?” she continues. “All those interpretations and projections onto Black maleness in our country, especially at the time between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd’s murder — we were living in terror and screaming into a vacuum. Those are real concerns as they navigate love, relationship, sexuality, and a future. And so I was positing that the Black boy is the most challenged in this coming-of-age era. I also think it’s time for young men to understand their vulnerability, their thoughts, their feelings.”

With the show, Brock Akil aspires to be the storyteller to younger generations that Blume was to her. “I’m hoping I could do that for another generation — to say, ‘Here’s some truth around your curiosities, and we trust you to make good choices,'” she says. “That’s what Judy did for us.”

As for whether she’d be up for continuing the story with another season, Brock Akil has a promising response: “There’s absolutely room for that,” she says. “In this art form, I don’t make it for myself. I’m making it for an audience. I believe that the audience wants character-driven, complex love stories. If the audience wants more, I want more. Let’s go do it.”

Forever is streaming on Netflix.