Mara Brock Akil strikes again. This time, the beloved creator of iconic series like Girlfriends, The Game, Being Mary Jane, Love Is and more is putting first love on full display and reimagining Judy Blume’s novel Forever… for the titular Netflix series.
“Judy writes from a place of truth, honesty, nuance and detail, and from the first time reading her books — I think I started with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret — she snatched me,” Akil told Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “It was grounded. It was at my eye level. It was the characters set on their own spine, and it made me see them, and it made me feel seen because she was really in the details and the scope.”
She added, “That was one of the biggest things that I wanted to translate in this version of it, the reimagining. I wanted to have scope and scale, the epicness of love, and then the intimacy of love, which is about those details. And I think when you are that caring in crafting it, it allows people to settle in because they feel safe. I think that’s what love ultimately should feel like. It should feel safe. It shouldn’t make you nervous. It shouldn’t make you anxious. It should make you settle in. Sometimes the truth might not be what you want to hear, but it is what is needed to say. I wanted to make sure that we translated what was given to me as a young person. I wanted to give that gift back to the globe, girl.”
Akil’s goal is to reintroduce Judy Blume to young readers who can benefit from her narratives as Akil did as a child because they still ring true today.
Why does the show focus on that first puppy love?
From the beginning of Forever, we’re introduced to characters Justin Edwards (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha Clark (Lovie Simone), two teens who were almost destined to reconnect after parting ways following elementary school.
The series follows the two as they navigate the exhilarating highs and lows of being one another’s first.
“When you make your first choice in love, it’s gonna be measured by where love is in your life,” Akil said. “And so where…who does Justin belong to? Who does Keisha belong to? Who loves them is how they’re probably going to inform their first choices about love, and that was also important, and also our responsibility to each other, and more specifically, how the adults are responsible to make room for young people to fall in love.”
“Let’s be honest about it,” she continued. “That’s what they’re going through. So why don’t we make that space for them? In 2018, I wanted to talk about our fear for our children. Our love was parented through catastrophic thoughts, and so it narrowed the space in which our young people can find love and figure it out, and I think we need to open that back up so that they can figure things out and we can witness them. We can see them and help guide them so that they are safe into their future. So love is all around, and we need it constantly. You see the parents engaging with the children at pivotal moments. But mostly, isn’t it great that Keisha found Justin and Justin found Keisha when they both needed it most? Justin needed to wake up and get on with this life and figure out who he is, and she needed to be released from this mistake that she didn’t need to carry on her own, and as a result, they were able to help each other get back to their best self.”
Informing today’s youth through Justin and Keisha
Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr.’s performance of Keisha Clark and Justin Edwards in Forever is nothing short of remarkable. It also provides today’s youth with an on-screen depiction of some of the things that they face, which is totally different from what young people were experiencing in 1975, the time period in Judy Blume’s critically acclaimed novel.
Themes like social media, sextortion, prom proposal mayhem, mental health and everything in between place the characters in Forever in today’s generation — something that Simone knew was important to showcase through the lens of someone like Keisha Clark.
“I hope, even if it’s not the same trauma or the same thing, any young girl that’s going through something, I hope that from Keisha, they know that they can rely on community a little bit more,” Simone said. “Because I do feel like women, Black women, especially, they tend to isolate and try to solve all their problems alone. So, just knowing that you have people around you that are willing to lift you up and to care for you, even if they might not have the same solutions you might have right away.”
“It’s an actor’s dream to develop a character like [Justin],” Cooper said. “And it’s a testament to Mara’s writing because she had this specific idea of bringing a character like Justin alive, and I’ve never seen him, personally, on my screen before. I mean, it was this really interesting thing, and it was complex in a way that I was kind of scared because I’d be on set asking Mara, ‘Does he have to cry right now?’ Like, you see him be so vulnerable. We gotta really do this today. It was a dream, and this interesting thing was healing for me, too. It was healing.”
Forever is now streaming on Netflix.
