When Mara Brock Akil was a little girl, she voraciously read Judy Blume. Looking back, she sees her obsession as the start of her becoming a writer.
So when Akil heard that Blume was allowing her work to be translated to the screen, she was ready: “My little girl hand just shot up, ‘I want to do that!’” says Akil.
She adds that while this generation’s youth can search the internet for information — and, sometimes, misinformation — Blume was her own trusted source.
“The Information Age linked us and let us see things that we weren’t able to see or know, and Judy was that for us,” says Akil. “Judy was writing from a place that was really grounded and gave full humanity to young people and their lives. She took their lives seriously.”
Akil has channeled her affection for Blume’s work into a new adaptation of the author’s 1975 novel “Forever…,” which premiered Thursday on Netflix. Focused on two teens falling in love, the book contains sex scenes that placed it on banned lists from its inception — and Blume, whose work offers frank discussion of subjects like masturbation and menstruation, remains no stranger to banned book lists, despite selling more than 90 million books worldwide. But as censorship ramps up again, Blume has become something of a hot commodity in Hollywood. In addition to the documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” a feature film based on her novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” was released in 2023, an adaptation of “Summer Sisters” is in development at Hulu and an animated film based on “Superfudge” is in the works at Disney+.
Michael Cooper Jr. in “Forever.”
(Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / Netflix)
Akil’s “Forever,” set in 2018 Los Angeles, stars Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone as the teenage leads — though the roles are gender-swapped from the novel. In 2020, while Akil was developing the adaptation, she tried to think of who the most vulnerable person is in society.
“I posit that the Black boy is the most vulnerable,” she says. “My muse is my oldest son, and through the portal of him I got to go into the generation and just really start to look at what was going on.”
While working on the project, she realized there are few depictions of boys and young men whose story is anchored in love, rather than relegating love to a side plot. “Mentally, emotionally, physically — they too deserve to fall in love and be desired and have someone fall in love with them,” she says. “And for Keisha — his honesty was attractive to her. How often do we ever really see that level of vulnerability be the leading guy?”
In true Blume style, Akil also incorporated a central issue affecting people today — technology.
“The phone is a big character in the show, because there’s a lot of duality to the phone,” she says.
Throughout the series, the characters use phones to connect and disconnect via blocked messages, lost voicemails and unfinished texts. In the premiere, the drama revolves around the dreaded disappearing ellipsis — that feeling when you can see someone typing and then it stops.
Mara Brock Akil.
(Emma Feil)
Akil laughs when I bring it up: “At any age, that ellipsis will kick your butt.”
And when you add sex into the mix, everything becomes more charged. “The phone in the modern times is an extension of pleasure in sexuality, when used in a trusting way, and then it can be weaponized,” says Akil. “It can be so damaging to this generation’s future at a time in which mistakes are inherent in their development.”
It’s this keen awareness that the mistakes haven’t changed but the consequences have that grounds Akil’s version of “Forever.” “There’s a lot of real fear out there and real tough choices that parents are going through,” says Akil. “And in this era of mistakes, kids can make a mistake and die by exploring drugs or —”
She stops herself. “I get very emotional about the state of young people and their inability to make a mistake,” she says, “because I think most young people are actually making good choices.”
Akil says Blume and her family have seen the episodes more than once and told the showrunner she really enjoyed them. Akil remembers first meeting Blume.
“I was nervous. I wanted to be seen by her,” she says. “I fangirled out and she allowed it and then was, like, sit your soul down. We had a conversation, and it felt destined and magical. I was grateful that she listened, and it allowed me to come to the table saying, ‘I know how to translate this.’”
I ask Akil why she thinks Blume’s work continues to resonate, lasting for decades in its original form and spawning new projects to attract the next generation of viewers and, hopefully, readers.
“She’s relevant because she dared to tell us the truth,” says Akil. “And the truth is forever.”
The story of how Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr., the stars of Netflix’s “Forever,” first met is like a perfectly scripted meet-cute that was fated to fuel a tender portrait of young love.
Cooper was on a flight bound for Los Angeles from Atlanta for an audition, stressed because his car had been stolen three hours earlier. But he heeded his agent’s advice to worry about it later (“He’s like, ‘Just go! If you book this, you can buy another car,’” Cooper recalls). Simone was his seatmate, en route to audition for the same TV series. Not that they had any clue then — they didn’t speak to each other on the flight. And they didn’t encounter each other in that first round. It wasn’t until they both got a callback for the chemistry read that it clicked.
Now, they’re poised to become the next teen obsession as the latest couple to go from book to screen in the newly released “Forever,” Mara Brock Akil’s adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 coming-of-age novel.
Both are relative newcomers — Simone, 26, has several TV credits to her name, including “Greenleaf” and “Manhunt,” while Cooper, 23, has a handful of shorts and film credits. They were cast last year to play the leads, Keisha Clark and Justin Edwards. “Forever” captures the intensity of first love and the powerful imprint it leaves as its teenage participants fumble through emotions and insecurities.
Set in Los Angeles in 2018, the series follows the romance between Keisha and Justin, two high school students who live on opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum. Keisha is a smart and confident track star whose circumstances pushed her to mature early and set big goals for life after high school, while Justin is a shy, music-loving guy who struggles with schoolwork despite his best efforts and pushing by his successful parents.
They first meet in grade school but reconnect as teens at a New Year’s Eve house party and quickly fall for each other, leading to a whirlwind romance filled with puppy eyes, miscommunication and deep longing. Their story, tracked over the course of a year, is punctuated by a sex video making the rounds at school, disruptive parental expectations and ample use of the cellphone block function (which leads to many unanswered texts).
Lovie Simone as Keisha Clark and Michael Cooper Jr. as Justin Edwards in “Forever.”
(Elizabeth Morris / Netflix)
“That first love — it changes people,” Simone says. “It changes your view on boundaries and connections and how you want to connect. It shapes you because it’s all of these ‘firsts’ and processing them and feeling them so intensely. Not in a traumatic way but in a life way.”
“Vulnerability is so tricky,” adds Cooper. “A lot of us tend to suppress emotionality versus run to it. Your first love exploits it in a complete way that you’re not accustomed to.”
The pair are in town again, this time seated in a plush, mauve-colored booth at Netflix’s offices on Vine Street on a recent day in April. If “Forever” rides the current teenage romance wave just right, it has the potential to serve as a defining breakthrough for both. But that’s not what has them laughing and growing bashful. In this moment, they’re reflecting on the lessons, growth and cringe moments that come with being young and down bad for someone.
Cooper talks about planning dates weeks in advance because of his nerves and wanting to get things right with his first girlfriend. “It was this palpable love that you can’t shake,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want to take her to the beach! I want to take her hiking! I want to have a picnic!’ It sticks with you and shapes your idea of how you see the world. And it made me put someone else before myself.”
Simone’s first boyfriend, she says, was a secret. “I’m from the Bronx, so we would sneak away to Times Square in Manhattan and link up and go on dates to the movies and stuff. I remember he got me a Swarovski bracelet and I had to hide it.”
“Hold up — he got you a Swarovski bracelet?” Cooper interjects. “What?”
“Yeah!” Simone says. “I was 15 or 16. He was a year older. When it ended, I was just so distraught for, like, two years. Just a mess. But it makes you put yourself first, eventually.”
Cooper credits Akil for grounding “Forever” in that beauty of discovery in adolescence.
Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone at Hachioji Ramen in Little Tokyo, a pivotal location in the series.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a passion project decades in the making, even if Akil didn’t realize it.
The writer and producer is known for a TV catalog that explores the joys and complexities of Black women, with shows like “Girlfriends,” “Being Mary Jane” and “The Game.” Akil was first introduced to Blume’s oeuvre with “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” reading it in less than two days. It set her on a search for more of the author’s work, known for depicting the confusing experience of growing up. She was 12 when “Forever” started getting passed among her friends.
“Pages were falling out because the book had been passed around so much,” she says on a recent day at her production office in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood. Akil, who makes a point to stress her love for sleep, recalls fighting off slumber to read it.
“I remember my mom turning off the light, and she made me leave my door open because I would close it so I could stay up late to read. But she left the hall light on and I would read the book like this,” she says as she mimics holding a book, stretching her arms as if trying to get a sliver of light on a page. “I think I still have this ‘Forever’ crook in my neck.”
It was a seminal text for her adolescent mind, she says, because she was curious about how one goes from liking and kissing someone to knowing when they’re ready to engage in sex. What is that like? How do you do it? Where do you do it? Does it hurt? How do you talk about it? “Connect the dots for me,” she says. “Forever” offered some insight.
“There’s a passage in the book that explores that — how they are making this decision and how are they doing this. I thought it was really honest and well done,” she says. “Even the first time around, it didn’t go so well. Nothing bad happens. But it wasn’t this idyllic, romantic moment. It was awkward. And I appreciated that.”
Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone in “Forever,” which was shot in Los Angeles and features recognizable locations and landmarks.
(Elizabeth Morris / Netflix)
Not everyone feels the same — it has been on the American Library Assn.’s list of most frequently challenged books since the ’90s. Just last March, Florida’s Martin County School District banned it from its schools.
If you ask Akil, it speaks to the power of Blume’s pen and what has made her one of the most celebrated young-adult authors: “She treated our humanity as seriously as we took ourselves and really captured the psyche of being young. That roller coaster of joy to ‘Oh, my God, life is over’ for the smallest thing.”
Akil didn’t give the book much thought since those formative years. It wasn’t until she landed an overall deal with Netflix in 2020 and became aware that some of Blume’s work was available to adapt that Akil was determined to find a way to translate it for a new generation. However, at the time, “Forever” was not available to be optioned.
That didn’t deter Akil. She reread the book and requested a meeting with Blume, who had written it for her daughter around the time when the birth control pill became available to unmarried women. On a Zoom call, where they both wore blue-framed glasses, Akil made her pitch. Now, “Forever” marks her debut series with Netflix.
Tapping into the need for more inclusive depictions of young love, Akil’s take isn’t a straight adaptation. For one, it centers on two Black teens, and the characters’ names have been changed to Keisha and Justin. And while the emotions the teenage characters display are universal, they are also informed by reality.
Akil decided to set the show in 2018 and have the characters attend predominantly white private schools to grapple with the experience of being young Black people navigating such institutions as they aspired for the best opportunities for their future. The inspiration stemmed from the widespread conversations about microaggressions and systemic racism prompted by George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr., stars of “Forever.” “A lot of us tend to suppress emotionality versus run to it,” Cooper says. “Your first love exploits it in a complete way that you’re not accustomed to.”(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Blume’s “Forever” centered Katherine, framing her as the more vulnerable protagonist because of her gender and the time period, but Akil’s adaptation explores how both Keisha and Justin are equally vulnerable. Keisha is trying not to let a scandal define her personhood. “I love that you can see what Keisha’s going through as a young Black woman with a lot of pressure on her — that anxiety, that weight the world places on you, that feeling that there’s no room for mistakes,” Simone says. “And she pushes through.”
Similarly, Justin, as a Black teen boy, is just as vulnerable when it comes to his future and the exploration of sexuality.
“I don’t see Justin in the canon that often. I don’t see the awkward but cool love interest, Black leading man in a story,” Akil says.
The experiences of her eldest son, Yasin, helped shape her vision for Justin, Akil says. (Yasin also created the music that Justin works on throughout the series.)
“I was nervous to step into the role,” Cooper says. “But there was one particular line that Mara wrote that said something like, ‘[Justin] has one foot in insecurity and the other foot in confidence’ and it hit; I was like, ‘I can connect to this.’ Even though he is different than who I am … there is something so real and raw about it. Mara wrote such a full-figured person.”
Akil also wanted Los Angeles to play a role in their love story. The production filmed in real neighborhoods — Keisha’s family lives in Crenshaw, and Justin’s family lives in the affluent View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood. As the season unfolds, the pair visit places like the Fairfax District, the Santa Monica Pier and Little Tokyo.
“Something unique about living in Los Angeles, some of our vernacular here we say, ‘Above the 10, below the 10’ — I wanted to bring the beauty of both sides into it,” she says, referencing the interstate that cuts the city in half. “And how challenging that would be for young people who either don’t have access to a car or haven’t learned how to drive yet. What are the challenges it would be to see each other? It adds to the drama of it all, the connection.”
Akil’s vision earned Blume’s seal of approval.
“I was never going to do an adaptation of ‘Forever,’ but this was different. It was to be her take on ‘Forever,’ inspired by my book,” says Blume, 87, in a statement to The Times. “Now that I’ve watched all the episodes, some of them more than once, I think Mara has done a fine job reimagining the characters and story of my book. I hope audiences both new and old will come away satisfied, as I did.”
Akil, who came up as a writer on UPN’s coming-of-age sitcom “Moesha,” says she needed actors who could make you want to root for their characters, whether together or apart, and could delve into the wellsprings of the search for identity that is crucial to this story. Simone and Cooper embodied that apart, she says, but together, they brought something else out in each other, though Akil struggles to define it.
“But you can just see it. Something shifted,” she says. “I think Michael was unpredictable to Lovie and that brought something out in her that was just really beautiful. And that is what love is — it’s unpredictable.”
Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone are poised to become the next teen obsession thanks to “Forever.” Judy Blume has given her stamp of approval: “I hope audiences both new and old will come away satisfied, as I did.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Palpable chemistry between leads is, of course, crucial to young-adult romance adaptations — it’s what made streaming series like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and “Normal People” successful. The night before their chemistry read, Cooper ran into Simone outside their hotel while she was waiting for an Uber Eats delivery from Wendy’s. They ended up reviewing scenes together.
“That was the first time that we had ever processed or done anything together at all,” Simone says. “It was fun. It was like, OK, now that we’ve done this in this room with the Wendy’s, we have to go out there and get it.”
Regina King, who directed the pilot and is an executive producer of the series, says she encouraged the actors to use their auditions as a touchpoint.
“I would often remind them about the first time they auditioned together and how their hearts were beating fast; the nerves may have been just because you wanted to get the role, but it’s also that, ‘Oh, what is this actor going to be like?’ What was that first feeling when you guys sat there in front of that camera, in front of us?”
Now, a few hours after our initial sit-down, Simone and Cooper are huddled inside Hachioji Ramen in Little Tokyo for a photo shoot; Simone is filling Cooper in on the horror film she’s been busy shooting. The location is significant — it’s where their characters meet for a final date of sorts, having broken up and preparing to navigate life after graduation. Choosing not to attend Northwestern like his parents did, Justin is pursuing his music instead. Keisha, meanwhile, is bound for Howard University.
“The development of these characters, for them to come to that level of communication and maturity, is good for young people to see,” Cooper says. “Justin is just stepping into himself, he’s growing up. Keisha is too; She’s at peace with letting go.”
“I love that you get to see some form of closure,” Simone adds. “Because a lot of times with breakups, there’s not much conversation around the ending. Endings can be beautiful. Endings can be beginnings. I do see Keisha and Justin reconnecting. I don’t know when or for what. They need to be themselves separately. That’s important to see too, that you can grow outside of each other.”
Akil hopes to continue exploring their story beyond one season. Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.
“Forever…,” the 1975 Judy Blume YA novel about teenagers losing their virginity, has inspired a Netflix series with changes you’re free to regard as substantial or superficial. Premiering Thursday, it’s a very sweet show, full of characters whose differing needs and ideas sometimes put them at odds, but who are for the most part very nice. The worst you can say about any of them is that they are clueless or confused in the way that people, especially young people, with their incompletely formed brains — a scientific fact someone raises helpfully — often are.
I’ve never read any of Blume’s books, though I have read reviews and synopses of “Forever…,” and visited Reddit groups where contributors recall secretly passing the novel around in high, middle or even elementary school — Blume (already a kid-lit superstar for “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”) plus sex being an irresistible combination: adolescent hot stuff, mid-’70s style. I can report at least that in both the novel and the series, a character has named his penis Ralph.
The TV show, created by Mara Brock Akil (“Girlfriends”), cuts the ellipses from the book’s title. The characters are Black, a change that is both superficial and substantial. It honors the shape and intent of the novel while adding issues not on Blume’s agenda regarding Black culture and advancement. More significantly, the series has been set in the near-present day — 2018 — and moved from quiet suburban New Jersey to sophisticated, sprawling Los Angeles. The first episode is directed by Regina King (“One Night in Miami”).
Things have changed in the half-century since “Forever…” was published, even subtracting the years the series backtracks. Not that teenagers weren’t falling in love and having sex — or not falling in love but having sex — in the year that Captain & Tennille released “Love Will Keep Us Together.” But the texting and blocking, the free-for-all backwaters of the internet and the carnal shenanigans that color contemporary TV teendom do put a different complexion on growing up. Of course, young people can be having a lot of sex while not, in the strict formulation, “having sex,” if you get my meaning. Yet a show about a couple of high school kids who, whatever else, have never Gone All the Way, and take the prospect seriously, can feel like a throwback to more innocent times — and that is not a bad feeling at all.
Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) are our young lovers, who meet, or meet again — they had known each other in elementary school — at a New Year’s Eve party, thrown by Keisha’s rich but not snooty friend Chloe (Ali Gallo), the series’ only regular white character. (There is fondue, the whitest of all foods.) Justin and Keisha come from different sides of the tracks , or “the 10,” in L.A. psychogeography; his family has a big modern mansion in the hills, while she lives with her mother, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), in an apartment down around Slauson and Crenshaw.
Playing Justin’s (Michael Cooper Jr.) parents are Wood Harris and Karen Pittman.
(Elizabeth Morris / Netflix)
Keisha is an A student (and track star) whose friends call her Urkel; her mother struggles to pay for the Catholic school to which she’s recently transferred. A full-ride scholarship to Howard University is in her sights, and there’s no reason to think that she won’t get it, even with a sex tape that’s gone around.
Justin, who has “a learning difference” and problems with “executive function,” struggles in school, but his mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman), a successful executive — it’s one of those jobs that requires barking into a phone while walking quickly through a room — has supplied him with tutors and wants big things from him; he’s not sure what he wants. (Mother and son alike may be putting perhaps too much faith in Justin’s ability to shoot three-pointers when it comes to college admissions.) His father, Eric (Wood Harris), who cooks for the family and runs restaurants — including, in this TV reality, the real-life Linden, a Hollywood center of Black society — and never went to college, is more easygoing. (“Life works things out when it’s supposed to,” says he.)
The kids are honest and sincere, not stuck up, not phony. Keisha seems a little more on top of things, life-wise, though she will jump to conclusions. Justin, less interested in whatever high-powered business future his mother imagines for him, dreams of a career in music, which in this context means “making beats.” Though Simone and Cooper are not actual teenagers, they are fresh-faced and radiant and youthful; they’re pretty adorable. Their parents, too, are likable, loving, hard-working people, a little bossy now and then, but genuinely concerned for their children. As in the real world, the kids handle some of their business better than their elders, and sometimes the elders prove wiser than the kids. (Not too often though — this is a series aimed at young viewers, who won’t have come for a lecture.)
Keisha and Justin bumble into and out of a bad first date, but before too long, he’s texting her, “think I woke up with a girlfriend can u confirm” and she is replying “how can I be ur girlfriend if u haven’t asked me.” (He will.) Things get better and worse and better, happier and sadder and so on, as the couple travels through eight episodes of mostly ordinary drama — jealousy and insecurity, mopiness and mooniness, desolation and elation, miscommunication and reconciliation — on the way to maturity. They’ll get into minor trouble with school and parents. The infamous sex tape — something shot by Keisha’s former boyfriend, Christian (Xavier Mills), but distributed by an offscreen character — leads to a conversation or two, but is more or less old news by the time story begins. Justin isn’t bothered.
Interestingly for a modern teen show, nobody’s getting drunk or doing drugs, apart from a couple of pot-smoking adults and flirty old friend Shannon (Zora Casebere), who comes on to Justin during the family’s annual summer decampment to Martha’s Vineyard. “I want you to be my first,” she says, “It would be awkward and we would laugh through it.” He thinks love should have something to do with it.
As a coming-of-age story, it’s more about the electrifying present than the unwritten future, however often that future comes up for discussion. Ultimately, it leads our heroes to the common enough question of what happens to their union after graduation. Not to give anything away, but anyone who’s survived their youth will understand that the title is ironic — or, with Blume’s ellipses, reattached for the title of the final episode, at least inconclusive.
