Love Story: JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette Is Trying Too Hard to Be The Crown for America

If the Kennedys are the closest thing America has to a royal family, then Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was our Princess Diana. Like her British counterpart, she was an outsider—albeit a beautiful, stylish, blonde, privileged one—to the palace intrigue that consumed the family she married into. She was stalked by paparazzi, restricted in her professional pursuits and social life, alternately worshiped and vilified in the media. And then she died, in her mid-30s, in a horrible accident, alongside a man with whom she may or may not have had a future, only to have her legacy dissected for decades to come. We never let either woman rest in peace.

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These parallels are not lost on the makers of FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the anxiously awaited first season of Ryan Murphy’s real-life romance anthology. Created by Connor Hines (Space Force) and adapted from Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the show adheres to what might be called Ryan Murphy’s Law: Every morsel of narrative subtext must be converted into text before the end of the season. As soon as you think to yourself, wow, they’re really giving Carolyn the Diana treatment, characters start saying things like: “You’re going to be the American people’s princess.” This results in a surprisingly restrained fusion of The Crown’s later seasons and a Murphyverse obsessed with reframing 20th century American mythology—a story that contains many strong elements but doesn’t dig deep enough to avoid tedium.

Like Once Upon a Time, which challenges previous accounts that painted Bessette Kennedy as a “bitchy” degenerate, JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is a revisionist project that makes Carolyn its protagonist. The casting was crucial here, and Love Story really got it right with Sarah Pidgeon. A Tony-nominated Broadway alum who came into the series with a few TV (Tiny Beautiful Things, The Wilds) and film (The Friend, I Know What You Did Last Summer) credits, she will still look like a fresh face to most viewers, as Bessette did to the world when her relationship with Kennedy went public. Pidgeon’s performance is brilliant. Far from the tabloid caricature, her Carolyn is a model of intelligence, poise, ambition, and control—a no-nonsense career woman who seems, at once, to be genuinely reticent to step into the Kennedy spotlight and playing hard to get in a savvy romantic long game that recalls the hit mid-’90s dating manual for women, The Rules. We get to know and like the character not in spite of her complexity, but because of it.

The Kennedys are less enthralling, maybe by design. True newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly looks a lot like the tall, dark, and dashing John Jr., and does a fine job in the blandly written role of a son unwilling and likely unable to equal a father he barely knew, his failures constantly enumerated in headlines. (“I don’t want to be a great man,” he tells Carolyn. “I just want to be a good man.”) Naomi Watts, who was mesmerizing as society icon Babe Paley in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, gives an uncharacteristically broad, baby-voiced performance as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, chafing at her “America’s widow” identity and dancing shakily to the Camelot soundtrack with a painting of JFK. Whether you call this mode camp or melodrama, this is the rare Murphy production where it doesn’t work. Kennedy Onassis’ death in 1994, before her son could bring Carolyn home, was tragic for the world but well-timed in the context of the show, which improves after her early exit. Amid a mess of indistinguishable Kennedy cousins, the one memorable portrayal is Grace Gummer as John’s protective older sister, Caroline, still playing surrogate parent to the overgrown boy she cared for while their mother lost herself in grief.

Pidgeon and Gummer aside, the show’s greatest assets are its audio and visual elements. In response to early criticism of the leads’ costumes and wigs, the Love Story team rededicated itself to getting John and especially Carolyn’s looks right—and to my admittedly non-expert eyes, costume designer Rudy Mance and hair department head Michelle Ceglia have done it. Carolyn’s wardrobe is all drapey, meticulously simple elegance. The black, white, and khaki that predominate in the offices of Calvin Klein, the center of the fashion universe at the time, where Bessette worked her way up from the retail floor to become a publicity director and “VIP whisperer,” read just as they did at the time, as sleek and modern and minimalistic rather than boring. (In a storyline that doesn’t amount to much, Alessandro Nivola’s slightly catty Calvin bristles that his employee’s fame is eclipsing his own.) Production designer Alex DiGerlando’s ’90s New York is neither generic ’90s nor generic New York; it’s young, glamorous, elite Manhattan, from John’s industrial Tribeca loft to the leafy interior of then-trendy fusion restaurant slash celebrity hangout Indochine. The music is more romantic and sophisticated than the grunge, nu metal, gangsta rap, and teen pop that dominated the radio throughout the decade: Mazzy Star, Björk, Sade. In accordance with Ryan Murphy’s Law, there’s an absurdly on-the-nose dance to Pulp’s “Common People,” but the scene is too much fun to groan at.

The mise-en-scène is so immersive and Pidgeon’s Carolyn so compelling, I often forgot that the story itself was slow and repetitive. We barely glimpse the couple’s lives before they met; she unenthusiastically dates a doofy model-actor-waiter, Michael Bergin (Noah Fearnley), while John tries to extricate himself from a clingy Darryl Hannah (Dree Hemingway), who comes off poorly in an episode that implies she used Jackie’s death to try to get him back. Instead, we see a lot of false starts to a relationship whose chemistry could, frankly, be more vividly conveyed. Also: a lot of Crown-style lamentation about the media “vultures” who have been pecking at the Kennedys for generations. The real tragedy, we’re made to understand through endless reiteration, is that Carolyn thinks she understands what she’s getting into—that she plans and hesitates and analyzes and forces John to have hard conversations before she’ll even consider his marriage proposal. But once they do return to Manhattan after a remote, troubled wedding, the feeding frenzy is many degrees of magnitude worse than it had been when they were dating. It turns this capable woman into a shut-in, a wreck. She’s jealous that John has George, his faltering magazine, while she’s too much of a distraction to work in the industry she loves.  

It’s ironic, certainly, that marrying John destroys the very independence that made her so attractive to him. But that isn’t quite enough to hang an eight-episode drama on. The experience that The Crown depicts and JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette echoes is that of the ultimate gilded cage—what perpetual scrutiny does to a family compelled to prioritize appearances over relationships, tradition over love. Through the former’s Diana and the latter’s Carolyn, we observe how fundamentally the lives of royalty, official or honorary, differ from normal lives, and how impossible it is for a person who didn’t grow up in such a maelstrom to adapt to it. 

But that’s easy enough to grasp that there should be room for other ideas. For all its flaws, The Crown balanced its royal characters’ travails with bigger questions. It asked what function the monarchy fulfilled over the course of Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign, what impact the Windsors had on the British, the peoples they colonized, national and global politics. On occasion, it spent time with regular citizens—servants, bureaucrats, journalists, coal miners—filling in negative space. Love Story shows no interest in understanding what the Kennedys meant, and still mean, to a nation that prided itself on having no kings but elevated this particular dynasty as a surrogate royal family. That’s a shame, especially as heirs whose affiliations range from the far right to the young left continue to drive American politics. If the people we put on pedestals are mirrors for society, then what did the Kennedys say about us in the 1960s? The ’90s? Today?