Why We Fell in Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Bissette | American television

HeyOn a recent sunny Sunday in New York, love seemed to be everywhere. Fans lined up around the block for tables at Panna II, the string-lit Indian restaurant where Ryan Murphy charmingly and — if we’re being picky, imprecisely — made the first date for John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bissette. Across town, there was a JFK Jr.-like contest, which was brazenly staged in Washington Square Park rather than in my bedroom. The young women downtown were wearing leggings and clean girl makeup, and outside the movie theater everyone was smoking as if Parliaments still cost $2 a pack.

Ryan Murphy’s swooning reimagining of the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Bessette has already generated buzz, with Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette racking up 40 million viewing hours to become the most-watched FX limited series on Hulu/Disney+ to date. But it struck a deeper chord in the culture, too, with legions of fans taking up the couple’s fashion and irreverent swagger, often wanting to try them on for size. Nearly 300,000 posts on TikTok and Instagram have been tagged with #CBK, videos that focus primarily on Bessette’s chic style, as brands compete to capitalize on what Puck calls Bessette’s “halo effect.” While working on this piece, I received a newsletter from J Crew titled “A Simple 90s Love Story” with links to Bessette’s wardrobe dupes like the “Carolyn Crewneck” and tortoiseshell headband.

A Love Story cleverly lifts the lid on a couple so ingrained in the American public imagination that after their deaths in 1999, the cover of The New Yorker showed the Statue of Liberty wearing a black mourning veil. We know from the series’ opening shots of the couple boarding a light plane that this love story isn’t going to end well, but the early episodes were full of the fun beats of an old rom-com. Bisset (Sarah Pidgeon) is edgy and funny: the kind of woman who can roll out of bed hungry, comb her hair, and yet appear at her Calvin Klein advertising job looking like she stepped out of a magazine. Alongside her, John F. K. Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) is a golden retriever whose cute suit belies his desire to delay his appointed fate as the heir to Camelot for as long as possible. Sparks fly between the couple after they meet at a party, where Bisset plays with the moon man and refuses to give him her phone number. “You know where I work,” she says, biting her lip.

She’s too great for him, and he knows it. In scenes that aim for, and sometimes verge on, the erotic desires of a Nora Ephron film, JFK Jr. pursues Bessette around town, showering her with red roses, and making overtures to walk by moonlight through streets mysteriously devoid of trash (Murphy hates trash). Also enjoyable are the moments when the show leans into the big, heart-swelling sentiment of a Nicholas Sparks paperback: After one brief estrangement, JFK Jr. bikes to Bessette’s house to declare his love for her in the pouring rain.

With no writing or directing credits for Murphy, Love Story gets its deft balance of pulp and prestige from creator Connor Haynes, a relative newcomer whose previous biggest writing credit was on the Netflix sci-fi sitcom Space Force. From the jump, Hines knew he wanted to bring JFK Jr. and Bissette to Earth. “I’m not interested in a show about celebrities,” he said. “I want it to feel like you’re watching a boy and a girl trying to solve their problems. He’s in his head and she’s in his head, and he didn’t call and she didn’t call… I want it to feel like, ‘Oh my God, I was there, or I sat there wondering.'”

Pidgeon has already been nominated for an Emmy (and will likely win) for her role as Bessette. She’s circling around Kelly, a former supermodel who doesn’t quite have the panty-dropping appeal of JFK Jr. but does have the square jaw and delicate chest hair. “We live in the world of electrolysis guys,” executive producer Brad Simpson told GQ. “It was a real challenge to find that kind of guy – a guy that women and gay men would be attracted to, but also guys that would want to spend time and have a beer with them.”

Other details take a more ambiguous approach to loyalty. Production designer Alex DiGerlando told Curbed that while they painstakingly recreated Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ home from existing photographs, the interior of JFK Jr’s Tribeca apartment is a mystery. That gave interior designers the freedom to imagine it as a shrine to 1990s minimalism with glass brick and granite countertops. It’s stylish as hell, and probably too sophisticated for a real American bachelor with a big dog. Would America’s son be unrestrained enough for an upstairs bedroom without walls? It’s fun to imagine.

Not everyone is enchanted. When asked about Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bissette in a recent interview, Kennedy descendant Jack Schlossberg was categorical. “I want people who watch the show to remember one letter, which is F for fantasy,” he said, adding of Murphy. “He makes a lot of money by making a grotesque display of someone else’s life.” In a New York Times op-ed, actor and former girlfriend of John F. Kennedy Jr., Daryl Hannah, condemned her unflattering portrayal as “exploitation of tragedy” and “misogyny.”

The show works best if you come to terms with it as a shining embellishment on one of the all-time great American myths. JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bisset were the closest the United States got to a royal family, capturing the public’s imagination and enduring intrepid photographers who tracked their every move. They were a perfect fodder for gossip magazines in the ’90s, feeding the rags’ appetite for candid paparazzi shots over chic red carpet photos. It helped them to be stylish, young, and not afraid to get into heated arguments in public. “You will be the princess of the American people,” Bessette was told as she prepared to marry John F. Kennedy Jr. on a remote Georgia island. She rolled her eyes at her friends before responding, “You’re both crazy.”

It was almost as crazy as imagining that Bisset would be caught dead wearing Zara. When Ryan Murphy posted camera test photos of Pidgeon as Bisset last year, fans criticized the costume as looking suspiciously off the rack (“Shane of Camelot” was my favorite of the scathing comments). Murphy listened, hiring a 10-person “Fashion Advisory Board,” scouring eBay and borrowing collectors to outfit Pidgeon with original Prada and Yohji Yamamoto pieces, as well as an Hermès Birkin watch that they artfully smashed to resemble the bag Bisset had carried while riding the subway. It rarely works when shows pay so much attention to online conversations, but this recalibration of Love Story’s style is a rare example of fanservice that pays off.

Love Story arrives on the heels of a slew of dodgy ’90s remakes and reboots like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, and The Crow, and with the news that The X-Files and Clueless are coming next. It’s no surprise that we want the ’90s back on screen. The decade was far from perfect, but at least we weren’t all walking around with little computers in our pockets giving us minute-by-minute updates on all the terrible things going on in the world. Maybe that’s why Love Story feels like a magical off-switch for anxiety: it transports you to a time when, if you didn’t turn on the TV or stop by the newsstand that morning, you could simply tune out the world.

But in my opinion, the show’s masterstroke is not only to reclaim the contract, but to give it an Auramax feel. In Murphy and Haynes’ hands, the romance between JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bissette is bigger, the streets are cleaner, the apartments are more stylish, and the couple is as beautifully doomed as the Lana Del Rey songs that accompany fan edits. The love story doesn’t advance a time machine to the 1990s. Makes it better.