Mara Brock Akil on George Floyd, Judy Blume, Smartphones

As it turns out, what it’s like to be a teenager hasn’t changed all that much since 1975.

That’s what Mara Brock Akil concluded in the process of making a modern-day Netflix series out of “Forever,” the groundbreaking Judy Blume novel about high-schoolers preparing to have sex for the first time. Katherine and Michael, Blume’s protagonists, were sorting out their feelings for each other only 15 years after the FDA approved birth control pills and just two years after Roe v. Wade solidified the right to abortion nationwide. Akil’s Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) start their senior year in 2018, spending half of their time on Instagram and not yet privy to the invasions into their sex lives coming from the Trump administration. And still, the two couples have everything that matters in common.

“Young people are so much more knowledgeable about sex and sexuality than when she was writing it back in 1975, so initially, I was told that she wasn’t sure ‘Forever’ would translate in modern times,” Akil says. “But she was willing to have a conversation with me around what I thought was still relevant in the book. And the universal truth is that young people have a lot of emotions. They’re falling in love for the first time, and they’re curious about sex and whether those two things go together.”

Akil knows this from her own adolescent years — she remembers reading “Forever,” when she and her peers were “curious about this near-future experience of having a boyfriend that we loved and confronting whether we’re gonna have sex with them or not” — as well as the journey she’s on now, at 54. “I typically go find a muse for my work, and where my heart has been the last few years is the raising of my sons and being a ‘boy mom,’” she says, having a 16 and 21-year-old of her own.

From both of those experiences, her takeaway has been the necessity to take young people’s love lives seriously, including the relationships they think will last forever, despite how rarely that’s true. “I posit, and I believe Judy did too, that going through that rite of passage being witnessed by your parents and adults that care about you is the safest time. It’s good to allow children to do this when they’re in close proximity to a village that cares about them and will help protect them.”

That idea informs one of the biggest changes Akil made to the original story of “Forever.” Unlike Katherine and Michael, Justin and Keisha are Black.

As Akil sees it, the novel operated with the assumption that young women were the most vulnerable members of society, “about to take this leap” into sexuality following the advent of birth control pills. She sees things differently as a Black mother in the 21st century.

“I heard that one of Judy’s motivations for this book was to speak to her daughter. One of the motivations for this for me,” Akil says, “is to speak to my sons. I then posited that Black boys are the most vulnerable. One minute, they’re cute, and the next minute, they’re seen as dangerous for some reason. All of these ideas are put upon them.”

The warnings Akil found herself giving her sons as they grew up, and the fears she developed about their safety, are why her version of “Forever” opens in 2018 instead of 2025. “From the end of Obama’s second term until George Floyd’s murder, Black families were screaming in a vacuum about the safety of our children, and I feel like we were the only ones listening to each other,” she says. At the same time, she noticed a shift in the kinds of culture her kids and their friends were consuming. “In music, young men were talking about their emotions, even if it had language around it, and young women were starting to talk about, ‘Something’s happening with our bodies.’ They still need love and connection, but there’s honesty going on about their agency too.”

These gendered observations led Akil to make another big change: a gender swap, with Katherine’s personality mapped onto Justin while Keisha represents Michael. Justin’s point of view is what anchors the show, allowing Akil to spotlight a different image of Black masculinity than what she felt society was being fed before 2020. In the finished series, Cooper plays Justin with a wide-eyed, dorky earnestness. He struggles to manage his interests in music and basketball with his homework and tests, his ADHD a constant reminder that school is more challenging for him than it is for some of his peers. “There’s this beta awkwardness,” Akil says. “There’s some confidence in him, sure, but he’s still trying to figure it out. And isn’t that worth taking up space and being seen as desirable?”

Rewriting the character of Michael as a girl was a bit more complicated. In the novel, Blume doesn’t explore Michael’s inner world as much as she does Katherine’s; instead, he’s a window into how young women are affected by the things their male counterparts are taught about dating. Akil — best known as the creator of “Girlfriends” — knew she couldn’t put her female lead in the backseat in that way.

“I had to find a way to express that the character was more sexually advanced than the innocence of Katherine, or Justin, but I wanted to mark the times,” Akil says. “So the engine in the middle of their love story is the myriad of complications of the phone, because the phone is part of young people’s sexual experience now.”

Smartphones play a major role in Akil’s “Forever,” with much of Justin and Keisha’s relationship being mediated digitally. They’re constantly blocking and unblocking each other’s numbers in times of conflict, then posting smiling snapshots of each other on Instagram when things feel stable again. But it gets more serious than that.

On Justin and Keisha’s first date at a movie theater, Keisha casually crouches down to offer Justin oral sex. Never having experienced that before, he’s shocked and pulls back, leading Keisha to storm away. Justin is confused at the intensity of her reaction, but soon realizes that Keisha has assumed he’s turned off by her sexual history. Unbeknownst to him, Keisha had left her last school after a video of her performing oral sex on her ex-boyfriend got passed throughout the student body.

“These documented experiences, though fun one day, can be so damaging the next day. Children’s mistakes, because of that lifelong documentation, can follow them their whole life,” Akil says. “Back in the day, it could pop up through someone’s gossip, but that gossip might only stay in that community. I wanted to mirror the times. Because as much as the characters are sex-positive, they’re also aware of the challenges of the phone. They’re trying to figure out who to trust. And that’s real connection.”

The fallout Keisha’s sex tape pulls her and Justin together and apart multiple times throughout the series. First, her assumption that he’s judging her about it keeps them from getting close to one another. Then, when he shows her support that no one else has, they begin to build a real relationship. But that gets complicated the longer they try to keep the secret of the tape from both of their mothers, who have different reactions when they eventually find out. Dawn (Karen Pittman), Justin’s mom, immediately jumps into problem-solving mode, which rubs Shelly (Xosha Roquemore) the wrong way — especially given their class differences, as Justin’s family is far wealthier than Keisha’s.

“If you think Justin’s family has financial success, look at the village of love of Keisha’s family,” Akil says. “She’s got cousins, a granddad — and you start off buying into the stereotype of the single Black mother, but then you realize, ‘Wait a minute, the dad’s engaged.’ She actually has a lot.”

Justin’s family ends up learning a lot from Keisha’s, and vice versa, as they both rally around the romance blooming between their children, hearkening back to Akil’s central thesis. “Though one is working class and one is upper-middle class, both families want the same things for their children,” she says. “They believe their best future comes from education. They’re trying to put them in the best schools that they can afford. Judy and I talked about this: A lot of white families give their children freedom and independence, and Black families, out of love and out of fear, we get tighter on our teenagers.”

With that backdrop, it’s hard to ignore how much weight a love story like Justin and Keisha’s takes on — no matter how long it lasts.

“Young people take their own lives seriously. They take their feelings seriously,” Akil says. “We as adults know it likely is not going to be forever, but we get to help them move through those feelings. We get to witness their first choices, and help them learn how to take a girl on a date. That human experience, that rite of passage, is the thing that allows you to go have a future, right?”

She concludes: “It’s no different than if I’m writing for a 30something-year-old couple. Why is that love more real or more valuable than a 16-year-old deciding, ‘I really like her. I can’t stop thinking about her’? The only forever love is self love, but the only way to get to that self love is in relationship to each other. I wanted to honor the truth of that.”