A Forever for Right Now

Photo: Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

The mystique of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever … lies in its frankness. Her depiction of two teens who fall in love and go on ski trips and slowly, gradually work their way from kissing to hand jobs and intercourse and orgasms hits at a precise, paradoxical point of what’s most shocking about teenage life: It is full of taboos, yet all those taboos are being broken all the time. A 2025 adaptation of Forever … must juggle several questions at once: How can anything made in the era of Sex Education and Euphoria have the same boundary-crossing juice of a novel about teen sexuality in the ’70s? Should it, even? Have algorithmic pressures shifted what feels frightening and meaningful for high-schoolers now? Are teens in 2025 … the same?

Netflix’s Forever, created by Girlfriends and Being Mary Jane showrunner Mara Brock Akil, offers several impressively effective answers. There’s no simple yes or no. The social pressures are identical, yet they play out in contexts Blume’s teens never could have fathomed. The intensity and anxiety of early sexual experiences are the same, too — just as awkward, just as compulsive, just as fumbling and ecstatic — but they exist in a framework of expectations and high stakes Blume’s teens did not have. Ultimately, the success of this Forever is a result of how well Akil navigates the challenge of writing about what teens are like at any moment in history. Her teens are completely brand new, a generation that’s unlike any that’s come before, and they are also exactly the same as every human teenager has ever been.

While Blume’s Forever … was set in white, affluent Westfield, New Jersey, this adaptation has moved to Los Angeles, where its Black teens come from very different backgrounds. Justin, played by Michael Cooper Jr., has parents determined to shape his future in a way that pushes him toward long-term financial success while also helping him survive the pervasive racism that makes life particularly dangerous for young Black men. His father (Wood Harris) is a very successful chef and restaurant owner; his mother (Karen Pittman) is a corporate finance executive, intensely focused on Justin’s future. She’s decided that his safest route to adulthood is getting into a good college, and his best odds of getting into a good school is through basketball. Does Justin really love basketball, though? Eh.

At a friend’s party, Justin spots Keisha (Lovie Simone), a high-school track star who immediately recognizes him as a childhood acquaintance but whom Justin has entirely ignored until now. Because now she’s very cute. Keisha’s life is dramatically different from Justin’s. She lives with her single mother (Xosha Roquemore), who works several jobs in order to afford Keisha’s tuition at private school. Keisha is full of all the internal motivation that Justin lacks. She is determined to go to Howard and has been shaping herself into an ideal candidate through academics and athletics, and she’s been doing it despite needing to change schools for reasons she’s so far hidden from her mother. She and her ex-boyfriend made a sex tape, and of course it’s now started circulating among their social group. Even after moving schools, it hangs over her like an anvil yet to fall.

Justin and Keisha are young and hot, and they understand each other but are also total strangers in each other’s worlds. So they text, then hang out, and shyly greet each other’s parents, then hustle into a bedroom, then it’s the oldest and most familiar story of all time. The underlying tensions are all there: money and class; sexual desire; parental pressures and social expectations. But the very particular shape of how they work in Justin’s and Keisha’s worlds are important, and they are finely wrought throughout the series. The details are in the designer collab they wait in line for at the mall, and with their friends texting and FaceTiming their every thought, and in Justin’s desire to buy Keisha things she can’t afford, and her mix of desire and reluctance communicated through Simone’s nuanced emotional calibration. Justin’s mother worries when he wears a hoodie, and his father reminds Justin of exactly how to behave and where to keep his car registration in case he gets pulled over. Keisha’s mother is perpetually exhausted, and the task of earning enough for Keisha’s school is always just a hair short of impossible. Yes, it’s clearly Blume’s Forever …, with all of its thematic interests and hilarious specificity intact (Justin still calls his dick Ralph!), but the reason it lands with the same impact is how thoroughly Akil translates it into this not-quite-contemporary setting.

Forever is set in the near past, and that’s the only element of the production that leans toward slightly slippery avoidance. The series aims for a current portrait of teen romance, but rather than 2025, the series is set in 2018. That date feels just close enough, in technology and fashion and contemporary politics, that you often forget it’s not meant to be right now. Teen culture is no doubt palpably different for any teenager in 2025, but it’s much fuzzier to see shifts from 2018 to 2025 from the comfortable distance of being a few decades older. Forever is not making any huge claims about the difference in teen life pre-COVID, or before Trump’s reelection. Instead, the choice to take place in 2018 is a protective nostalgic veneer — it saves the series from the challenge of immediacy, and it can feel just a tiny bit like a throwback. It’s a dodge, but not an unwelcome one. Who wants to tackle post-pandemic politics? Two teens who’ve had smartphones their entire lives, grappling with coming-of-age amid social media is plenty.

The parents play a much larger role in this Forever than they do in Blume’s original version, and some of that is the result of needing to stretch a novel into an eight-episode TV series. Any teen drama can get bulked out with the addition of some adult drama, and Forever makes good use of Pittman, Harris, and Roquemore. But its greatest assets are the performances from Simone and Cooper as Keisha and Justin. Forever could be the best written, most thoughtful, best produced adaptation anyone’s ever conceived of, but without two actors who can look excruciatingly horny yet terrified at the same time it would never work. For as much as Keisha and Justin are teens of their era, they are also the closest and most vital connection between this series and Blume’s original work, able to shift instantly between bravado and giddy pleasure and fury and shy innocence in the space of a single scene. They are what give this Forever the juice, imbuing a TV portrayal of teen sexual exploration with wonder and disappointment and some frank mechanical uncertainty. They make Forever feel timeless.