🎧 'Forever' Began at Northwestern: Mara Brock Akil & Karen Pittman
I talk to the longtime pals about their groundbreaking Judy Blume Netflix series: 'I don't think we've seen that perspective on Black family'
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Mara Brock Akil remembers the exact moment she first saw Karen Pittman. It was Northwestern University in the late ’80s, and the cafeteria was a sea of mostly white faces. “ But this Black girl walks through the cafeteria, shoulders back, head up. She just felt like she was in her own orbit,” Akil says now, with Pittman sitting right beside her. “I remember her light.”
That early connection led to decades of friendship as Akil and Pittman, now in their mid-50s, built their careers in entertainment. Akil, the creator of the iconic TV series Girlfriends and The Game, is one of the most prolific and influential Black women working in television. Pittman, an opera student back at Northwestern, has performed on Broadway and in a wide range of television shows, including most recently on And Just Like That… and The Morning Show. But when her old friend Mara told Pittman about the upcoming adaptation of Forever — while the old friends were seeing Usher in Las Vegas, no less — she recognized the opportunity to jump into something truly rewarding.
“ I had not had the experience of working on a show that was literally about African-American families in a very specific time since I worked on a Netflix show called Luke Cage,” PIttman tells me in today’s special Sunday edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, recorded in person at Netflix’s offices in May. “I was very lucky to work with Alfre Woodard and LaTanya Richardson Jackson on that show. They took such a beautiful role in guiding a lot of us as women on that show. So I remember going on the set of Forever and being like, oh, I know what to do in this. Because of what Alfre offered me.”
Akil puts it even more simply: “I love her work, I love what she does, but I wanted to give her something more to eat.”
On Forever, adapted from Judy Blume’s classic novel about teen romance, Pittman plays a character inspired by Akil: a very successful Black mother living in Los Angeles who cannot shake her fears about the dangers faced by her son (played by Michael Cooper Jr.). Updating Blume’s story for the modern age, Akil very deliberately set the show in 2018, the period between the murders of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, when “Black people felt alone, that we were screaming in a vacuum to each other,” she says. “ I think we now know that in 2025, we are all collectively screaming. And I think the only way out is love.”
Having known Akil so long, Pittman sees the show as the ultimate realization of her friend’s unique perspective on the world, “which is very Black. It’s very female. It’s about love, and I don’t think that we have seen that perspective on Black family, on Black relationships. Thank God for all the wonderful creatives who talked about family and relationships in Black culture, but we’ve never seen a woman’s perspective on it.”
In our wide-ranging conversation, Pittman and Akil talked about all of this and so much more, seemingly inviting me and all of the listeners in on their decades-long friendship. Here’s the part you can’t hear by listening to today’s podcast: When we paused at the end so engineers could capture room tone, they held each other’s hands.
Great story. Love the NU connection! Will have to watch the show!
What a great show this is.