By Mark Winston Griffith
It’s rare to find fully realized Black teenage love on screen. The last 40 years of cinema is strewn with teen romances, but they consist mostly of straight white leads (often accompanied by a Black and/or gay sidekick) who follow some variation of the boy-finds/loses/finds-girl story arc. Even in contemporary television series like “All American” and “Bel-Air,” the intentional centering of young Black (straight and queer) relationships and Black cultural settings feels more like paint-by-the-numbers marketing choices than authentic explorations of Black life.
Created by television veteran Mara Brock Akil, whose credits include “Girlfriends,” “Moesha,” and “The Jamie Foxx Show,” the Netflix Series “Forever” doesn’t so much escape the dictates of the teenage romance genre as endow it with flesh-and-blood and a cultural currency that Black audiences, in particular, can recognize and appreciate.
Our star-crossed lovers are high schoolers Keisha Clark (Lovie Simone) and Justin Edwards (Michael Cooper Jr.), who are each ricocheting their own way through quintessential high school drama, the college admissions process, and power struggles with their parental units.
Because it’s loosely — and I mean loosely — adopted from the 1975 Judy Blume novel of the same name, it has both the ambition and DNA of Blume’s coming-of-age stories, which is to say it sensitively renders teenage interior life with complexity and agency on a pop culture scale.
Continuing the comparison to “All American” and “Bel-Air,” the dynamics of the show are similarly set in motion by the burdens of Black excellence that are carried by Gen Z kids born to Gen X strivers.
Keisha and Justin both attend elite Los Angeles high schools, but their lives are shaped by a distinct set of high-pressure conditions. Keisha, who lives in a modest apartment, is a straight-A track star on a single-minded quest to earn a scholarship at an HBCU (Howard). Justin, who lives in high-priced comfort in Park-Windsor Hills, is struggling mightily with ADHD and his uncertain basketball prospects, is being pushed by his mother to be a legacy admit at a PWI (Northwestern, Mara Brock Akil’s alma mater). It says something about the expectations that come with their lives that Justin is universally considered “lost” because, at 17, he is unsure what career path to pursue or which elite university to choose from.
Thankfully, Simone and Cooper have enough chemistry to make the connection between the confident Keisha and awkward Justin believable and compelling, which comes in handy when we watch them make a series of knuckle-headed decisions, like reflexively blocking each other on their phone whenever their relationship hits a snag. (Blume is known for having frank conversations about teenage sexuality, but by the modern day standards of “Euphoria” and “Sex Education,” the sexual explicitness in “Forever” feels innocuous.)
As mature and emotionally advanced as they show themselves to be, like the vulnerability they submit to, or the ways in which they each shoulder the presence of a life-altering incident in Keisha’s life, the under-developed portions of their teenage brains are consistently on full display.
Keisha’s and Justin’s parents are not provided with extensively developed backstories of their own, but, owing mostly to strong supporting performances, they are much more than simple foils for the central characters. Xosha Roquemore gives Keisha’s mother, Shelly, the requisite amount of resilience and maternal wisdom, but the script provides more oxygen for Justin’s parents, played by Karen Pittman and Wood Harris. In a lesser actor’s hand, Dawn might be a one-note, fire-breathing Tiger Mom, but Pittman is formidable in a more multi-dimensional way while allowing just enough softness to seep through to make Dawn a mostly sympathetic character.
It doesn’t hurt that Harris’ Eric is seemingly heaven-sent to balance Dawn’s hard-driving approach. Harris has never been more comfortable in a role, arguably his strongest since “The Wire,” and his breezily charismatic presence lifts and lightens every scene he’s in. Eric’s earthy wisdom, along with the grace and advocacy he extends to his children, represent the kind of post-Cliff Huxtable fatherhood we all deserve.
“Forever” is pointedly set in the years leading right up to the start of the COVID pandemic, effectively adding an element of foreboding to the story and unsuspecting characters. This is increasingly the case when we learn that there is a scheduled second season of “Forever,” which would carry the story beyond where Blume ended it and subject Keisha and Jusin’s dreams and relationship to the Zoom-filled, mask-covered spaces of the coming plague. In fact, in the final moments of the last episode, there is a sudden rush of sagacity and maturity from Keisha and Justin that belie their years, as if the characters received a memo from the future to get it together before it becomes really hard to sustain a relationship.
Until that moment, I interpreted the series title “Forever” as an ironic take on the naivete of teenagers who believe that their romance will never die. Perhaps, though, it was a heads-up to viewers like me who were silly enough to believe that Netflix would complete the story in the purposeful way that Blume intended, instead of extending and draining the story for everything it’s worth. In the world of entertainment, love may indeed come to an end, but lucrative franchises are interminable.
Netflix/Elizabeth Morris photos.
This post appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.
