Tale As Old As Teens

A Judy Blume adaptation captures the timeless specifity of adolescent love.

- TV / KATHRYN VANARENDONK

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 a ski trip and slowly, gradually work their way from kissing to hand jobs and intercourse and orgasms hits at the precise, paradoxical point of what's most shocking about teenage life: It's full of taboos, yet all those taboos are being broken all the time. A 2025 TV adaptation of the book must juggle several questions at once: How can anything made in the era of Sex Education and Euphoria have the same boundary-crossing juice as 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 impressively effective answers, though never a 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 that Blume's teens did not have to contend with. 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. They are always 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.