“I don’t think I can get used to that,” she says, shaking her head. “Just seeing the book on the tabletop. Come on!” A week earlier, on the auspicious occasion of her 56th birthday, she had posted an Instagram video of herself unwrapping her first hardcover copy, overcome by emotion. “Look what God did!” she marveled.
Now in the fourth decade of her career, she is connecting on both a grander and a more intimate scale than ever. When we meet, in early June, she’s a couple weeks into production on Season 2 of Forever, a romantic drama that is reaching a global audience on Netflix and a rare story about teens that speaks just as eloquently to parents. The shoot coincides with the publication of Dionne Daphne on June 30. A novel of crisis and self-discovery in 1990s New York, it uses first-person narration to go deeper than any TV show could into the perspective of the eponymous Essence beauty editor, whose outwardly glamorous life has come to a sudden crossroads. Drawing on some of Brock Akil’s toughest experiences, and coming at a time when she’s eager to speak with—not to—the next generation, it may be her most generous act of communication yet.
The Mara Brock Akil TV canon. Clockwise from top left: Being Mary Jane, Forever, Girlfriends, The Game —Being Mary Jane: BET—Everett Collection; Forever: Elizabeth Morris—Netflix; The Game: Scott Humbert— CBS Paramount/Everett Collection; Girlfriends: Ron Tom—Paramount Television/Everett CollectionIntelligent, driven, and beautiful, with elite educational backgrounds and impressive careers, these characters are not identical to Brock Akil. But each bears some resemblance to her at different stages of life. “Girlfriends was my singledom,” she reflects. “The Game is my coupledom. Mary Jane is about my success.” Yet she thinks of them not as conduits for her perspective, but ways of starting universal conversations: love, work, whether “having it all” is really possible.
Brock Akil has been drawing insights from her experiences for as long as she has been a working writer. Raised in the L.A. area and, after her parents’ divorce, Kansas City, Mo., she studied journalism at Northwestern, then moved back to her hometown to pursue a career in TV. She arrived amid an explosion of Black sitcoms—The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, Martin, Family Matters—and rose through the writers’ room ranks on Fox’s South Central and UPN’s Moesha, both produced by Ralph Farquhar, a mentor. One early triumph was an award-winning 1998 Moesha episode in which the titular teen, played by America’s R&B sweetheart Brandy, is prescribed birth control. It was, Brock Akil recalls with a joy so immediate it’s like she’s suddenly back in that moment, the show’s first script to receive no network notes.
The book has many origin stories. One takes place during COVID lockdown, when an editor’s inquiry motivated Brock Akil to find a new format for the project she’d put aside because, she says, “nobody’s investing in the interiority of a Black woman in film—not then, not now.” Another is the first HIV test she took, as a young woman in L.A. The wait for her results felt like “the longest two weeks of my life.” When the test came back negative, “it gave me a renewal at a perfect time to focus on my life and my career and what I wanted.”
While Brock Akil’s experiences as a survivor of child molestation are not precisely mirrored in Dionne’s, her years of introspection have produced relationships and insights that feel authentic, including implicating oneself: “I have examined how I could get into a situation like that,” she says. Then she learned how infuriatingly common it is for people, especially but not exclusively women, to carry this invisible weight. She looks around the café where we’re sitting and estimates that, statistically, three or four of the put-together patrons sipping coffee share this dark element of her past. “We look like professionals, writers, actors, journalists—we look like all these things that we want to be. We don’t look like the things that have been done to us and that we have survived,” she says.“I’m fascinated by how long we carry them, how we move through them, through the other desires and goals of our life.”
The Revelation of Dionne Daphne
During a safari in Kenya not long ago, Brock Akil was moved by the collective nature of animal groups. “It hit me profoundly, how nature can teach you,” she says. “The pride is safe when they roll as a protective village. Our system is built around the isolation of family.” In tumultuous times for humanity, as fear and isolation run rampant, she believes that instead of “the core family, we should be talking about the core village.”
To forge such strong bonds requires open communication across differences, especially within a home or romance. Raising her sons expanded her empathy for Black men to an extent that is unmistakable in her recent work. “They’re caught in the patriarchal trap, too,” she says. Dionne Daphne shows us an ex-con struggling to get his life on track, a man who clings to his masculinity by denying his sexuality, a father emasculated by a society that expects him to be a breadwinner but limits his opportunities. Forever, whose first season won a Peabody Award and was, according to Netflix, viewed nearly 20 million times in its two months on the platform, introduces a privileged Black boy who falls for a working-class girl. Viewers get to know Justin as more than just a basketball star; he’s a sheltered rich kid, a student with ADHD, a developing person with softness and layers.
Her L.A.-based residency and mentorship project, Writers’ Colony, is one way of connecting with emerging talent, just as Brock Akil once did with guides like Farquhar. For a creator who was stretching budgets and cultivating audiences to weather Hollywood’s cyclical interest in diverse stories while millennial heirs like Issa Rae and Quinta Brunson were still in school, this time-tested apprenticeship approach is also a bulwark against the onslaught of technology. Maybe AI can spit out a novel or TV pilot with the superficial elements of a hit, but it can’t connect on a soul-deep level because it doesn’t have a soul. With that in mind, Brock Akil has been asking herself: “How are we not just entertaining, but being left more fulfilled?” It’s a question that could stump algorithms while fueling a lifetime of passionate, human conversation.
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