Judy Blume Classic Adapted Into Netflix Series

Wedged into the copy of Forever… that I downloaded as research for this review, just after the dedication and just before chapter one, is a note from author Judy Blume. Though the book was first published in 1975, this particular section was only added in 2014, to offer more up-to-date information about STI prevention.

It’s a tiny addendum, really — one single page — and everything that follows otherwise reads exactly as it has for the past half-century. Yet it speaks volumes to both the novel’s enduring popularity and to Blume’s willingness to reconsider her own classic in a more current context.

The changes to Netflix’s new take on Forever are far more sweeping, and altogether impossible to ignore. But seen in that light, the updates look less like a refutation of the original than an embrace of its spirit, executed with enough freshness to stand on its own and enough charm to inspire a new generation to fall in like (if not necessarily in love) all over again.

In credits, creator Mara Brock Akil’s series is indicated as being “inspired by” Blume’s book rather than “based on” it — a small but key distinction. Broadly speaking, the plot, insofar as there is one, remains the same. Boy (Michael Cooper’s Justin) meets girl (Lovie Simone’s Keisha) at a New Year’s Eve fondue party, in a premiere directed by Regina King. Boy and girl quickly fall for one another and spend the next several months navigating the highs and lows of young love, before the looming end of high school threatens to tear them apart.

Zoom in any closer, however, and most everything about the way that story unfolds has transformed. The protagonist role is no longer held by a white girl in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, but split between two Black teenagers zipping from South Los Angeles to the Hollywood Hills in 2018. (Which, technically, makes Forever a pre-COVID period piece — the characters even spend time at an Arclight.) The couple still wrestle with jealousy, uncertainty about the future and the anxieties of sexual intimacy, and the boy still dorkily, playfully refers to his penis as “Ralph.” But Keisha and Justin’s courtship plays out in distinctly 21st century terms: Instagram hashtag as grand gesture, sex tape as romantic obstacle, unsent texts as ephemeral diary entries.

While Forever is a teen romance at heart, its view of the young lovers expands far beyond their intense entanglement. As Keisha and Justin work through their feelings about each other, they’re also dealing with parental pressure, their post-high school plans, the realities of moving as Black kids in a world that can be hostile to them. In one scene, Justin, a rich boy who attends a mostly white private school, is overwhelmed after spending time with classmates from Keisha’s mostly Black Catholic school: “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this kind of Blackness before,” he exclaims, with the awed exhilaration of someone who’s put down a burden he didn’t even realize he’d been carrying.

As with another recent Blume adaptation, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Forever extends to its parental figures the same grace it does their children. It empathizes with Justin’s mother Dawn (Karen Pittman) fearing the worst when he drives alone at night, even as it gets his frustration at her overprotectiveness, and with his father Eric (Wood Harris, particularly wonderful) wanting to see his son accomplish what he couldn’t, even as it sees how heavily Justin wears those expectations. It feels for both the immense pride Shelly (Xosha Roquemore) takes in her golden girl Keisha, and the pressure Keisha feels to maintain her mom’s idealized vision of her at any cost. Forever sees that any true understanding of these children must include an understanding of the forces that have so lovingly, if imperfectly, shaped them.

All of this updating comes with some growing pains. In expanding the plot to eight hour-long episodes (probably twice as long as it took me to read the book), and the timespan from roughly six months to about a year and a half, Forever spends too long pulling its central pair apart, then pushing them back together, then pulling them apart again. Cooper and Simone’s performances are moving separately, and downright lovable together, whenever Justin and Keisha are flirting giddily over FaceTime or tenderly exploring each other’s bodies. But even their vivid chemistry can’t totally overcome the exhaustion of watching Keisha block Justin from her phone, or vice versa, for the umpteenth time.

Once the two do finally get their act together, their longest sustained period of blissful stability flies by in a montage of Instagram carousels. It’s something of a letdown after all the time we’ve invested poring over every icy text or tearful argument from their early days, and robs Forever of some of its emotional intimacy and heft. We’re left with a better idea of what stood between Keisha and Justin than what drew them so inexorably together, of the relationship’s glossy potential than its richer everyday reality.

(And as for their relationships with other peers, forget it — Justin has exactly one casual friend, played by Niles Fitch, who occasionally invites him to parties, and Keisha exactly one best friend, played by Ali Gallo, whose sole purpose in life is being supportive of Keisha. In an odd omission for a series otherwise determined to make Justin and Keisha feel as well-rounded as possible, neither has any other social life to speak of.)

But zoom back out again, and what becomes clear is that whatever its drastic changes or forgivable flaws, Akil’s Forever retains what matters most about its source material. Blume famously penned Forever… in response to her daughter’s request for a story in which “two nice kids … have sex without either of them having to die.” In the decades since then, the culture has evolved enough that adolescent sexuality is not the social taboo it once was, even if Blume’s novel remains a staple of “most banned books” lists.

But as long as there are teenagers growing up in an imperfect world, there will be a need for tales that take seriously the experience of being young and in love and in lust. That regard adolescent blunders with an abundance of empathy and a minimum of judgment. That allow them the space to grow up in their own time, and the compassion to do so on their own terms. Tales, in other words, like Blume’s Forever… has been for so many readers past and present — and like Akil’s Forever can be now for viewers today, and hopefully for generations to follow.