To Adapt Judy Blume’s Forever, Mara Brock Akil Made a Banned Book Even Bolder

Before we’d even sipped our spicy margaritas, TV mogul Mara Brock Akil and I realized we’d experienced most of our adolescent firsts in the same place. Akil was born in Los Angeles, but like me, grew up outside of Kansas City, Missouri. “LA is the dreamer in me, and Kansas City is the hard worker in me,” she says from a cozy table at Corner Bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “It’s been one of my most beautiful combinations, the tale of those two cities in me.”

Kansas City is also where Akil, now 54, first opened the pages of Judy Blume’s Forever—a controversial coming-of-age novel published in 1975 that’s often been blacklisted for its frank depictions of sex. Blume is notoriously protective over her vast literary catalogue, permitting only a handful of screen adaptations of her works—including 2023’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. But Akil, who was drawn to Blume’s flawed, authentic characters, earned the author’s blessing to make a modern series adaptation of Forever, which streams May 8 on Netflix.

Akil’s star-crossed lovers, Justin and Keisha (played by relative newcomers Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone), are Black teenagers in Los Angeles who cross paths on New Year’s Eve 2017. Their first meeting, in an episode directed by Regina King, is charged with the kind of adolescent desire a person only experiences once. “Yearning lives on in us, even as we get older and date,” says Akil. “But to fall in love for the first time? That’s a high we keep chasing for the rest of our lives.”

Over the course of eight stirring episodes, Justin and Keisha are pulled apart and pushed back together—often because of their parents’ strong beliefs about who they should date—as they navigate their final year before college at separate schools. There are no murder mysteries or car chases here, just the universal experience of wanting. Says Akil, “The journey of love is fearful enough.”

Justin and Keisha’s courtship is a slow burn of miscommunication exacerbated by technology that was supposed to simplify connection. “The phone can bring you together, tear you apart, be an extension of sexuality,” says Akil. “That’s hard to negotiate for adults, let alone for a child.” While the biggest sexually related fear for past generations might have been getting pregnant or contracting HIV, “now anything we do in the digital imprint could ruin our whole lives before we even know who we are and have a chance to grow up.”

Blume wrote Forever for her daughter, who requested “a book about two nice kids [who] fall in love and do it and nobody has to die.” Akil, too, was inspired by her experiences raising two Black sons with husband Salim, a fellow writer-producer whom she met during her four-season tenure on the beloved sitcom Moesha. “Judy and I talked about this. In the ’70s, parents—especially white parents—were like, ‘They’re safe in the world. Give them some independence until their choices are challenging their future.’” In Blume’s Forever, for instance, narrator Katherine intends to follow her boyfriend Michael to college, until her parents intervene. “But other than that,” says Akil, “those parents are like Charlie Brown’s parents—they’re not there.”

That hands-off approach informed Akil’s reimagining. Especially in the period between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd’s murders, she says, Black parents “were kind of screaming into a vacuum of fear, just discovering that moving up the hill or sending your kids to private white schools are not going to save your children. There was this catastrophic parenting happening that I participated in and witnessed. Police brutality against young Black men and the oversexualization of young Black women hang heavily over Akil’s Forever. “I just had a lot of compassion for the Justins and Keishas,” she says. “Katherine and Michael got the whole world to figure some things out, with a bit of guidance when they got off the rails. But our kids are having to find out who they are in the narrowest of gaps.”

Halfway through happy hour, I share one of my favorite lines from Blume’s Forever: “It’s strange, but when it comes right down to it, I never do fall apart—even when I’m sure I will.” Akil closes her eyes, leans forward, and asks me to repeat the quote. “I wish I had pulled that one,” she says. “That speaks to our humanness—that we can put ourselves together and deserve other people to help us put ourselves back together.”

Akil was nurtured by several Hollywood heavy hitters, including Debbie Allen and the late Garry Marshall. After graduating from Northwestern, she launched her career as a production assistant on Fox’s short-lived 1993 sitcom The Sinbad Show, then became an assistant on the one-season Fox series South Central. Her work dried up, but Akil stayed connected to her mentor on both shows, writer/executive producer Ralph Farquhar. “Though I was broke as a joke, I stayed believing in myself by writing scripts,” she says. During a fateful 1996 catch-up, Farquhar offered Akil her first staff writing job on Moesha. “I was literally thinking I was going to get some notes, and he’s offering me a job,” she says with a shake of her head. “I lost it. It’s a great story, right?”

Akil would go on to write for The Jamie Foxx Show before creating Girlfriends, her answer to Sex and the City long before that show remembered Black women also live in New York. When she created that hit series, Akil became TV history’s youngest Black female showrunner—and the first Black female showrunner with two shows concurrently on broadcast network TV when she launched its spin-off, The Game. Then came Being Mary Jane, a starring vehicle for Gabrielle Union that ran for four seasons. Akil cemented herself as the only Black showrunner or executive producer to have a show on TV every year from 2000 to 2017—both a testament to her talent and an indictment of the industry in which she flourished.

“There’s times when you don’t know that you’re the first. I’m just trying to tell the best story I know how to tell,” says Akil now. She’s reminded of a line she wrote for Keisha’s mother, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), who tells her lovelorn daughter in the Forever finale: “If God takes something away, God’s going to give it to you, the same or better.” Akil’s mother told her those very words when she broke up with her first boyfriend, a Kansas City boy named Stan.

“That’s what I survived on—that belief,” says Akil, who credits her mom’s mantra with all the success that came later. “I’ve been loved so well by the women in my life—my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, those three pillars. The community helped me feel safe enough to trust who I am, what I want, and what I like. So going back to that quote: ‘You think it’s all going to fall apart.’ And then you remember who you are and who loves you, and you get to work.”

Akil hopes to cultivate those same feelings with the next generation of Black writers through the Writers’ Colony, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit writing residency she founded in 2021 and expanded with an on-set shadowing program on Forever. “Writers’ Colony is an answer to the changes that are happening in our industry. There is no place to develop writers anymore,” says Akil. “It’s very difficult for showrunners to even get professional writers on set for their own script, let alone new voices.” Places like the Writers’ Colony foster community, as well as distinctive voices: “Don’t come here trying to be me. I’m still working on being me.”

All of this has led Akil to Forever—the second project under her overall deal with Netflix, following the 2024 Oscars shortlisted documentary Stamped From the Beginning, for which she served as an executive producer. That project was also based on a blacklisted book, this one by Ibram X. Kendi. “I’ve had no IP in my career, and with these two, I’m like, ‘Damn. Did I just back into being producer of the banned book?’” Akil laughs.

In truth, everything that made Forever such a contentious read in the 1970s has gotten more complicated in the decades since. Thanks to the internet, kids know more about sex at a younger age than ever; at the same time, access to reproductive healthcare has gotten scarcer than it once was. Blume and Akil discussed that during their first COVID-era Zoom about a potential collaboration, each one wearing blue, thick-framed glasses. “To meet someone that actually helped form my own voice was divine,” Akil says. She prefers not to share many details of their conversation, but adds, “I’m ultimately just grateful that we could have a real, substantive conversation about who we were as women, where we were in our lives, and why I wanted to adapt her book.”

Blume entrusted Akil with Forever and joined the series as an executive producer. “Come on, a Judy Blume green light?” Akil exclaims. “A little flex too is that I believe before I got to Netflix, they tried to get Judy Blumes—and they couldn’t land that deal,” she adds with a triumphant giggle. (Netflix did not respond to a request for comment.)

Blume allowed Akil to make significant changes to her story so long as Akil captured the essence of her book: “to allow young people to explore their feelings and curiosity around sexuality in a healthy way, and not jeopardize one’s future.” And devotees of the novel will be tickled to see that at least one infamous detail from the book remains: Our male protagonist still bestows an unforgettable name upon his penis. “I almost called him Jerome, a name traditionally associated with Black men,” says Akil. “But decided to honor the original and stayed with Ralph.”

Akil’s most personal touch on Forever can be found in the show’s matriarchs—particularly Justin’s mother Dawn, as played by Karen Pittman, a close friend of the showrunner who left the SATC spin-off And Just Like That… to shoot Forever. It’s a gift, as Akil phrases it, to “put some meat on the table” and know Pittman “is going to eat, as the kids say. The more she eats it up, the more you are inspired to give it.”

When asked just how much of Dawn’s strong-willed parenting style is based on her own, Akil lets out a knowing laugh. “Honey, writing is therapy. Dawn has allowed me to offer up a lot of my humanness, my vulnerability, my mistakes as a parent.” Dawn and Shelly both represent how “Black mothers specifically love so hard,” she says, in a way that can shape their children’s anxieties.

“Wanting your parents’ approval and love—I think that’s where most kids are, versus this idea of rebellion and hating their parents,” says Akil. “Justin can’t tell his parents who he really is” for fear of making it seem like he doesn’t value the sacrifices they’ve made for him, she says. “And Keisha feels like she can’t tell her mother because, ‘I’m the smart one. I’m Urkel. I don’t know how to tell you about who I am while trying to keep up perfection.’”

Writing Justin and Keisha’s adolescent romance at this point in her life “only made me more proud of little Mara” for choosing Stan to be her first love. “I think I made a good choice for myself,” at the time, says Akil. And just as her young lovers discover, finding peace with our path is all we’ve really got. “The only forever love is really self-love,” she says. “That’s the only thing you can really promise—and in a relationship, we should be evolving to our better self.”