In Judy Blume’s taboo-busting 1975 novel “Forever …,” a teenage girl has sex for the first time. It does not destroy her life. (That’s the plot twist.) But she is still surrounded by cautionary tales: unwanted pregnancies, untimely marriages and dreams deferred. The stakes of any tryst are higher for her than they are for her more experienced high school boyfriend.

When the showrunner Mara Brock Akil considered adapting the novel, a young adult classic, she saw the relationship through different eyes: her own, as a mother to Black sons. In her first meeting with Blume — whose seminal coming-of-age best-sellers helped generations understand their bodies and themselves — she made the case that a TV version should also be told from the perspective of the boyfriend, in a contemporary series focused on Black families.

If Katherine, the book’s heroine, seemed socially powerless in her era, “I would posit that Black boys are the most vulnerable at this time,” said Brock Akil, the creator of the beloved 2000s sitcom “Girlfriends,” and several other comedies. “A modern Black family, I feel like we know how dangerous the world is.”

Blume wrote “Forever …” in the aftermath of the Pill, in response to her daughter’s request for a story in which a teen girl doesn’t get punished for having, and enjoying, a sex life — the dominant narrative at the time. Blume’s antidote captures the dramatic rush of first love and the fumbling urgency of adolescent exploration in frank language that made it both irresistible for young readers (with dog-eared copies passed around in schools) and one of the most frequently banned books in America well into the 2000s.

Brock Akil with Michael Cooper Jr. on the set of “Forever.” In her first meeting with Judy Blume, she pitched the idea of centering the story on a Black family.Credit…Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

Brock Akil’s interpretation, which debuts on Netflix on Thursday, stars Lovie Simone (“Greenleaf”) and the newcomer Michael Cooper Jr., flipping the original story’s gender roles: Simone, as Keisha Clark, is more experienced and self-assured; Cooper Jr., as Justin Edwards, is the awkward one who falls hard and needs guidance. Winningly, it preserves the source’s emotional innocence — breathe easy, parents; this is not the hard living of teen fare like “Euphoria.” But it builds tension exploring issues of race and class.