Mara Brock Akil Grew Up With Judy Blume’s Very White Characters. In Forever, She Made Them Black

Nearly an hour into our conversation, veteran showrunner Mara Brock Akil started talking about the mythology of Black success. That’s a particularly intriguing topic coming from her, a hugely accomplished TV creator, showrunner, writer and producer — the mastermind behind beloved hits like Moesha, Girlfriends, The Game and Being Mary Jane. 

So, she’s far from a stranger to having her dreams fully realized. Her latest project, Netflix’s Forever, an adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic 1975 YA novel of the same name, is more testament to that. The tender drama series follows the first love story between two Black high school classmates (Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr.) who each grapple with high expectations — those placed upon them and others they have of themselves. 

Akil can trace her own lofty aims to the November 1981 cover of Seventeen featuring a then 17-year-old model named Whitney Houston looking gorgeous and happy holding an ice cream cone and sitting next to a similarly cheery-looking white girl. It’s the picture of harmony.

“I talk about the American dream a lot because it is sold to you in the pages of those magazines,” the showrunner told me in a video interview last month. 

Publications like Seventeen were ubiquitous in the homes of American girls across all backgrounds — regardless of the fact that they mostly catered to white teens. Even Akil said, “I was obsessed.” Houston’s cover was in many ways a disruption of the magazine’s racial homogeneity, though it didn’t lead to a whole lot of change within its pages. But for the then 11-year-old Akil, it was pivotal.  

Seventeen Houston was “my first image-maker,” Akil said with a warm smile. “I was like, Who is this? When she made it to the cover, I just felt like I made it to the cover.” 

There was a connection between the two girls, strangers in actuality but akin in their interests and how they took up space where you might have least expected it. Preteen Akil had learned that Houston was a voracious consumer of the same pop culture she was into at the time.   

“It was something about Whitney listening to Prince and Barbra Streisand and reading Judy Blume's books that kind of started to make me become my own,” Akil continued.

Her own storyteller, that is. Akil went on to pen stories, later majoring in journalism at Northwestern University and, well, the rest is history. Beginning in the late ’90s, her work helped resuscitate the Black and prominently female image on the small screen at a time when it was desperately needed and that continues today. 

Some might wonder, then, why her latest series isn’t squarely in the vein of her previous “for us, by us” projects and rather an adaptation of a white novel, particularly at a time when many Black viewers have been calling to bring more Black books to the screen. 

“When I was reading fervently back in the '70s and the '80s, there weren't any stories around young love that featured Black characters,” Akil said when I posed the question to her. “And I really love Judy Blume's writing.” 

While Blume has an uncanny ability to authentically portray the experiences of teenage girls in a way that connects with readers across the racial spectrum, Akil’s answer reflects the dearth of Black YA romance novels written by Black authors throughout her youth. Though, there was no absence of them. Brenda Wilkinson’s 1976 novel Ludell and Willie is one albeit rare example. 

Plus, there have been many other YA books by Black novelists published in the decades since then that could make worthy screen adaptations. But the choice of Forever was a personal one for Akil, and it tells you a lot about who she is and how she sees herself in a world that’s often fitted through a white lens. 

“Though, technically, this description is about white characters, I saw myself, I saw my friends, I saw my world,” Akil explains. “As you read, I can imagine the life that she's describing, but I also start to imagine myself. That's what great storytelling does, it allows you in.” 

Indeed, Blume’s Forever vividly tells the story of Katherine and Michael, two teens that fall in love and explore their sexuality individually and with each other in ways that are neither awkward nor risque but rather honest and relatable. 

In Akil’s version, the couple, now named Keisha and Justin, do the same, but through a story that feels unquestionably rooted in the Black experience. The series is still as much  interested in the joy, personal conflicts and love between its young protagonists as it ever was.  

With Forever, Akil gives herself the authority to create an adaptation of one of her favorite novels growing up that meets her where she and her community are, not the other way around. So, when it was announced that her “shero” Blume was making her novels available for adaptation in 2020, the showrunner jumped at the opportunity. 

“When I hear that for the first time [Blume] is allowing her body of work to be translated, I'm absolutely going to raise my hand,” Akil said. “I deserve to have access to that story just as much as James L. Brooks did,” she added, referencing the male filmmaker’s 2023 adaptation of Blume’s Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. “And so why wouldn't I?”

It’s that kind of audacity that also springs forth in the character of Keisha (Simone), a talented track star navigating deeply personal insecurities who sets her sights on attending an HBCU, and who Akil told me she saw herself in as a teen: “Very smart, very driven, very competitive and quietly making a lot of mistakes,” she said with a laugh. “I didn't want anybody to know.”

There is no sign of that uncertainty when Akil talks about what she brings to the table with this project. 

“Not everybody's gonna get a Judy Blume book,” she said. “I sort of earned the right to put my pen where I would love to put my pen and I would love to make room for young people —period —-but certainly for our Black young men and women [who deserve] their rite of passage of love.” 

That track record  is undoubtedly what got Akil the opportunity. She officially won over Blume, though, in their first meeting in 2020. But, initially, the author didn’t think that the book could be translated today at a time when depictions of teenage sexuality are far less taboo than they were in the Gerald Ford era when Forever first landed on Banned Books lists. 

Though, history has repeated itself once again since the book remains prohibited in some spaces today, decades after its first publication. 

Akil had a rebuttal already prepared for Blume when they sat down together.  “I said, ‘No, no, no. Hear me out, Judy,’” she recalled. “We had a beautiful conversation. She heard me and gave me the blessing to translate the work and offer it through the lens of Black characters.”

While particularly female bodies are still the center of governmental and societal debate today following the fall of Roe vs. Wade, Blume’s concern does raise a good question about whether a new version of Forever could have the same impact as it had originally. 

But it takes just a short while into the series to discover exactly how it intends to engage with what is considered controversial among teens in 2025. For instance, a plotline emerges from a widely circulated video of Keisha giving her ex a blow job.    

In the age of social media, one click can turn a private moment into the subject of public judgment and ridicule, which is what Keisha navigates throughout the series. Akil remembered her own teen years with a grimace: “Thank God I didn't have a phone.”

Particularly as a “boy mom” of two sons with husband and frequent collaborator, Salim Akil, she’s observed that that is the main source of tension among young people today. It certainly presents a challenge for Keisha and Justin (Cooper), who is shown her video early in their relationship.  

“The phone is a connection, it's a disconnection,” Akil explains. “Even the nature around blocking, how we miscommunicate. Both young and grown people are using it in their sexual experience. Though it can heighten it in some ways, it can also be very damaging.” 

Throughout Forever, Keisha and Justin take turns blocking each other when things get tough between them or when they get frustrated — or, as Akil alluded, completely misheard. 

“So, centering the phone in the modern day problems of the world was what I knew,” Akil said. 

“In the book, Judy places Katherine and Michael in the environment of all the other things that are challenging to youth. And I thought it was best to pull some drama in the middle of this couple. How do you know you're really in love without it being tested?” 

Or: How does your partner know what pleases you or makes you uncomfortable if you don’t  know or feel empowered to express it either way? Forever explores multiple instances of consent and very real sexual anxieties that the actors and intimacy coordinator Sasha Smith helped bring to life on screen.  

That’s what both Blume’s novel and Akil’s adaptation offer audiences: A safe space to have those conversations, the very ones that conservatives want so desperately to muzzle right now. 

That’s not lost on Akil. She pointed out that with her Netflix deal through her production company, Story27, she’s now adapted two banned books: Forever and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, a history of anti-Black racist ideas, which became a 2023 documentary. 

“I mean, that was not my mission statement for my company to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I wanna do all the banned books out there,’” Akil said. “I think what it does say is I wanna get to the truth.”

And that’s a point of contention among many today. 

“It's unfortunately what [books] people wanna take off the shelves,” Akil said. “And the truth is not all young people are choosing to engage sexually, but they are curious.”

They’re also trying to navigate their own ideals for their future, but often through the vision their parents have already laid out for them. As with Justin in Forever, the two often clash. 

His mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman), in particular, has worked hard to impress on both Justin and his younger brother (Marvin L. Winans III) what Black success and preservation can look like. For instance, she understandably expresses concern over Justin going out late at night, wearing a hoodie, when racist cops are eager to harass young Black men — or worse. She’s also elated when he starts dating a Black girl because she knows that there are only a few at his school. 

That look of accomplishment centers Black humanity, but it doesn’t exactly center Justin. It’s also compromised when you consider that success to his parents means living in a largely white neighborhood and Justin attending a predominantly white high school. Plus, his mom expects him to attend her alma mater, Northwestern University, another PWI. 

Making Northwestern Dawn’s college was intentional for Akil, who looked at her own relationship with her sons that, as she remembered, “were my first muse.” While the school was a wonderful experience for Akil (“What you're gonna know about Mara Brock Akil is that she loves Northwestern and Northwestern loves her,” she told me), it mirrors an emblematic tension between a successful Black mother and her gifted teenage son. Justin starts to see a different vision for himself that is markedly influenced by his relationship with Keisha and her aspirations. 

It leaves a lot to reconcile when it comes to natural Black parental fears and Black achievement — and how their relationship to whiteness shapes the American dream. 

And it forced Akil to reckon with herself. “I think one thing that writing does for me is allow me to have a little bit of therapy,” she said. She pointed to 2018, the start of Keisha and Justin’s senior year, when Black parents like her were trying to navigate very real fears in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death and Trayvon Martin’s murder and “screaming in a vacuum only to each other.”  

“There was a shift that Black families were starting to realize: Where is the safest place for our children?” Akil recalled. “You believe that to put your children in private white institutions is the best case scenario for their future. And you move to the top of the hill. Is it safer up there?”

She came to a bleak but familiar conclusion. “You start to realize, especially during that era, that your privilege or your economic status is not gonna save [you],” she continued. “Your degree is not gonna save you.” 

What might? Maybe Keisha’s choice of school is the answer. “A shift also was happening where Black families were like, ‘Wait a minute, maybe my child is better at an HBCU,’” Akil said. 

Looking at what unfolds in the series, it could go a number of ways. It could look like Justin; a young Black man and star basketball player struggling to determine who he is, what it is he wants and how to express that to loved ones who want “the best” for him. 

Or like the smart and talented Keisha, whose mother (Xosha Roquemore) works night and day to pay for her to go to a school that barely notices her. The real-life trope of “The invisible Black Girl,” Akil described it, at a private white institution. 

Though Keisha is able to reconnect with a former crush who sees her fully there, she still must contend with the expectation to succeed, and in a way people — coaches, college admissions offices, the Black community, parents, etc. — can identify. The same can be said about Akil, whose work has long reflected a deep appreciation for complicated Black experiences, even when questions about being inspired by a white source arise.

“If anybody has the receipts, I would say, of loving our people, it is me,” she said. Has the process of writing Forever helped her see herself more clearly? “I feel like I have grown as a mother,” Akil said. “It's also alchemising some of the choices that I have made.”