Photo: Hannah Whitaker for New York Magazine
The first boy Mara Brock Akil ever fell in love with was named Stan Bradley. It was 1986, and she was 16. Stan had just been a boy on the periphery: His mother owned the beauty salon that her mother frequented, so Akil would see him there all the time. He had a car and was a year older than her. One day, she and her best friend went to the skating rink, where they ran into Stan, and then …
Akil stops herself, no longer leading me through this reverie by the hand. “That’s something I’m preserving to be in my screen work,” she decides. We’re sitting on a bench on the Lower East Side on the last day of March, having the sort of conversation that usually takes place in a bar bathroom between 12 and 4 a.m.: rangy and emotional and encouraging, crackling with cackles and punctuated by an immediate Instagram follow. She’s taken me along for the New York version of her pre-writing ritual, since she wrote a significant amount of Forever, her Netflix adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel, at her favorite coffee shop “on the block,” a.k.a. Ludlow between Houston and Stanton. Akil, 54, is in her writing sweater, an oversize cream-colored cardigan that would make Nancy Meyers jealous. She points to a man unhurriedly exiting a car, despite being the cause of a small traffic jam. We relish in his slow place, his triple-check to ensure the dry-cleaner bags aren’t caught in the door. “Human behavior is one of the most useful things to watch and try to translate,” she says.
It doesn’t surprise me that Akil doesn’t want to give such a good story away. Those experiences have been her meal ticket for over 30 years, starting from her time as a young writer on UPN’s coming-of-age sitcom Moesha, where she’d referenced her Hello Kitty diary for story ideas. Since then, Akil has continued to mine her own life to create a slew of classic TV shows, all variations on a theme: a strong Black professional woman with great hair is a lawyer looking for love (Girlfriends, starring Tracee Ellis Ross), or is in medical school trying to hold on to her love (The Game, starring Tia Mowry), or is a TV anchor balancing work and love (Being Mary Jane, starring Gabrielle Union), or is a sitcom writer on the precipice of finding new love (Love Is, starring Michelle Weaver and based on how Akil’s Black Hollywood power-couple relationship, with her husband, Salim, a film and TV producer/writer/director, started).
Viewers looked forward to their weekly check-in with Akil’s characters, who are as flawed and resilient as real people, neither Shonda levels of chaotic nor reality-TV caricatures. They stick to the bones. It’s why people are still upset that Joan and Toni — the main characters of Girlfriends — were never able to fully patch things up, or why people warn each other not to be such a Melanie if someone is compromising their dreams for a partner. Akil likes to say that the best character-driven writing — her own and others’ — is set “on the spine,” where a viewer isn’t simply watching a character’s life, but rather seeing it through their eyes, or feeling it under their skin. (They also often exist in the same universe: Girlfriends’s Maya lives in the same neighborhood as Moesha and would babysit her younger brother, and The Game’s Melanie and Girlfriends’s Joan are cousins.) “My projects don’t have car crashes and murders and things like that,” she says. Akil is more interested in the pain that doesn’t show.
In 2020, Akil signed an overall with Netflix; Forever is her debut with the streamer. She’s mindful of the stakes — that, as a Black woman, her success or failure doesn’t affect only her career — but also that if the stakes are high, then so is her pull. “I am aware that they wanted one of her projects before and lost out on it,” she says. “A Black woman got them Judy Blume.”
Forever is one of the books that made Blume one of our most celebrated young adult authors — as well as one of the most blacklisted. Instead of being a cautionary tale about the dangers of premarital, adolescent-era sex — pregnancy, abortion, death — Forever is simply a tale of premarital, adolescent-era sex, featuring a young woman with a sexual appetite. (“This book was first published in 1975,” reads the Forever page on Blume’s official website. “My daughter Randy asked for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die.”) Accordingly, in the ‘90s, it ranked at No. 7 on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books. One school district complaint called it “basically a sexual how-to-do book for junior-high students”; another said it “does not promote abstinence and monogamous relationships.” Akil’s version is a sumptuous reimagining set in 2018 Los Angeles. It has all the trappings of a classic romance — the shy rich boy, Justin Edwards (played by newcomer Michael Cooper Jr., with the cutest butt you’ll ever see), falls in love with the cool poor girl, Keisha Clark (a luminous Lovie Simone). Simple miscommunications have ruinous outcomes; physical bonds are easier to maintain than emotional ones, all updated with modern teen problems: a sex tape texted to the wrong people, an ADHD diagnosis, and whether or not to take an Uber.
And in focusing on two Black teens, Akil’s Forever isn’t just a straight remake — it’s a racialized one, translated and amended to support Black life, dotted with plot points and emotional journeys that are undeniably her touches. Though Justin and Keisha, and Katherine and Michael (Blume’s characters), are dealing with the same party-pack of teenage emotions — uncertainty, humiliation, brilliance, headassness — their experiences aren’t the same.
Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) in Forever.
Photo: Elizabeth Morris/Netflix
For Akil, who first read Forever when she was 12 (“I probably shouldn’t have, but we were all reading it”), this was not an issue. Part of it came from the strength of Blume’s writing: “Even though she did not have a lot of Blackness — or any Blackness — in her books, she wrote with such humanity that I could project myself into the story and see myself, and understand.” The other was a standard Akil move: plucking moments from her life, or those closest to her, and fitting them into the story. When it came time for Akil to name the four leads of Girlfriends, she just looked at her bookshelf, where she saw books by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and E. Lynn Harris — and then came Toni, Maya, and Lynn. The title character of Being Mary Jane came about after Akil found herself listening to Alanis Morrisette’s “Mary Jane” on repeat while writing. In Forever, when we see Keisha’s mother (Xosha Roquemore) stressed at the kitchen table, sketching out a budget on a legal pad, it’s Akil depicting her mother, Joan — the same name she gave to the main character of Girlfriends.
So the mid-century modern décor in Forever? That’s Akil’s favorite style, seen both in her L.A. office and her home. The fixation on Northwestern University? That’s where she went to college. The Edwards’ family vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, the weekly community baseball games, and the joke that one of the mothers has a “catastrophic parenting style”? Mara, Mara, Mara. Take, for instance, a classic situation for a teenager: going to a New Year’s Eve party, which opens up both Blume’s and Akil’s stories. Blume’s characters come and go so easily they may as well be teleporting. Akil’s are stopped at their front door: Justin’s parents demand more information before he can leave the house, which turns into an argument. When Eric (Wood Harris), Justin’s father, admonishes his wife, Dawn (Karen Pittman, rescued from And Just Like That …) for being too controlled, she retorts: “We got cops out here shooting Black boys like it’s open season, and I’m trippin’?”
“The book doesn’t have a lot of plot, but as to the translation of the book — that’s really me,” she said. And thus come the questions that she, as the mother of two boys, has asked herself, that we see reflected back: How do I protect my sons? How do I give him agency? How do I tell him that some people will always see him as a threat, and how do I make sure that’s never true?
Though the show isn’t about Akil’s oldest son, Yasin, his experiences informed many of Justin’s. (As well as his beats — Yasin created the music that Justin works on throughout the series.) After the George Floyd protests of 2020, Akil noticed an increase of young Black people talking about the microaggressions in their private, white institutions, which shocked and interested her in equal measure. A pedigree doesn’t protect you. She decided to set the show in 2018, “a time in which Black families were screaming in the vacuum of their own terror,” she says. “I wanted to introduce the families at a time when the parents were heightened in their fear factor of parenting.”
After Dawn’s attempt to scare her son, Justin reminds her of the alternative: “There are kids at my school who don’t even come home on the weekends.” Dawn doesn’t buy it. She asks her son, dressed in a hoodie, the difference between himself and those other kids. Obviously, they’re white, Justin concedes, but who’s fault is that? “You put me in an all-white school!” he sputters, dumbfounded. The family moves on, and after a conversation laying out ground rules with his father, Justin is allowed to go to the party, where — of course! — he finds love. Mara, Mara, Mara.
Akil’s parents, high-school sweethearts, split up when she was 8 years old. When she talks about the people who raised her, she really means her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother — all inspirations for the strong Black leads Akil is known for constructing. “I love and respect my father, but he was not consistent in my life. Those three women were.” (Akil and her father are estranged.) After the divorce, her mother, Joan, moved Akil and her two siblings from the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles to Kansas City, where Joan worked her way up from being a secretary to a computer programmer for a pharmaceutical company. Still, sometimes she waited tables for extra cash to go toward her kids’ schooling. Akil ended up at Northwestern University, where she switched from a journalism concentration to a screenwriting one. This is her sliding-doors moment, a decision that would change her life. She describes it like falling in love: screenwriting gave her “the same feeling, if not more” as she had felt with Stan Bradley. After college, she wrote scripts while working as a production assistant for The Sinbad Show, eventually spending four years in the writers’ room for Moesha, “the Howard University of Black television.”
A year after she left, in 2000, she sold Girlfriends and became the youngest African American female showrunner in Hollywood. Getting it off the ground wasn’t easy: Though UPN had bought the show, Akil couldn’t find a studio to actually make it. (Eventually, Kelsey Grammer, flush with Frasier cash, stepped in as co-executive producer.) She joked that she knows how to make a dollar out of 15 cents. “I have thankfully, gratefully, been able to do some amazing storytelling, but the budgets for me were very limited,” she says, finishing her matcha. Akil’s shows have moved between UPN, the CW and BET, which were “smaller outlets, compared to, at the time, ABC, NBC. But you realize, my programming built those networks, reimagined them, and created economy in Atlanta. You don’t go into it thinking that, but that is a fact.” Recently, she tells me, she learned a not-so-fun fact about herself: She was the only African American showrunner to have a series on TV every year between 2000 and 2015, surfing the last wave of broadcast sitcoms.
Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), Toni (Jill Marie Jones), Maya (Golden Brooks), and Lynn (Persia White) in Girlfriends.
Photo: Ron Tom/Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
Akil knows what gets people to tune in. The Game had so many viewers — at its peak, over 7 million — that it broke network records. In 2013, Being Mary Jane premiered on BET and ran for four seasons; before the show even ended, Akil was already at work on Love Is, the show loosely based on her marriage, for the Oprah Winfrey Network. After the show premiered, actress Amber Dixon Brenner alleged in a lawsuit that Akil’s husband, Salim, had abused her over the course of their previously unknown, decade-long extramarital affair. Brenner also claimed the Akils had stolen the idea of the show from a screenplay she’d written about her relationship with Salim. (No charges were filed, and Salim denied all allegations.) The show was canceled after one season. When I ask Akil, as she embarks on her first show since, if everything that happened is on her mind, she answers: “No, but I’m curious as to why it’s on yours.”
It’s the only moment in our conversations where her easy intimacy falls away; not everything, I guess, is copy. Some things are too personal, or perhaps she just doesn’t have enough distance from it yet — having enough perspective on the personal is why Akil and Blume’s work resonates so well with audiences. Blume didn’t initially license the book for adaptation out of fear that it might not translate well to today. Sexuality had just changed too much. Akil only talked to Blume once before writing, when Akil argued that the story was an exploration of how we treat each other when we’re still figuring out how to be ourselves — how we communicate, how we connect, how we conflict — and that’s timeless. That’s the space Blume was trying to create for her daughter in writing the book. “We weren’t using these terms” — finding agency, taking ownership — “in 1982, when I was reading the book, but that’s what Judy put in the book,” Akil says.
Reading it, you’re most concerned about Katherine, a young white woman navigating romantic and sexual intimacy for the first time. In making the story her own, Akil refocused her gaze: “I posit that Black boys are the most vulnerable when it’s time, because before I can really talk to him about love and healthy protection, I have to talk to him about rape, as a Black man,” she says. “Your existence, with the thought of dating, is terrorizing, so you parent from that.” And perhaps as a corrective, the show implores parents to give their kids some room to move: “One of the reasons I’m so excited to have Black leads in it is that we, society, as parents, need to make space for their rite of passage,” she says. “They do think they’re grown. We know they ain’t. Let them figure it out. Let’s give them the truth.”
That’s what her mother did for her. When Akil was dating Stan, she went to her mother and told her she was ready to have sex, and that she wanted to start the pill. They talked — “about feelings, about love, about me and Stan” — for five hours. Ultimately, Akil wasn’t ready to have sex, but Stan was, so they broke up. (“There was only so much grinding you could do.”) But she remembers him fondly, and would love nothing more than to get dinner to catch up after all these years. “You’ve got to hold on to those, because sometimes, when you make some bad choices, you have to remember, Oh, I do know how to make a good one. And he was one.”
