Why we fell in love with Love Story: JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette | US television

On a recent sunny Sunday in New York, Love Story seemed to be everywhere. Fans lined up around the block for tables at Panna II, the twinkly string-lit Indian restaurant where Ryan Murphy’s megahit charmingly – and if we’re being picky, inaccurately – sets John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s first date. Across town was a JFK Jr lookalike contest, which was rudely organized in Washington Square Park and not in my bedroom. Young women downtown wore hip-hugging pants and clean-girl makeup, and outside a repertory cinema everyone was smoking as though Parliaments were still $2 a pack.

Ryan Murphy’s swoony reimagining of JFK Jr and Bessette’s romance has been a sensation, with Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette racking up 40m viewing hours to become FX’s most-watched limited series on Hulu/Disney+ to date. But it has struck a deeper chord in culture too, with legions of fans eating up the couple’s fashion and insouciant swagger, often wanting to try it on for size. Nearly 300,000 TikTok and Instagram posts are tagged #CBK, mainly videos focusing on Bessette’s sleek style, while brands jostle to cash in on what Puck calls the Bessette “halo effect”. While working on this piece, I received a J Crew newsletter titled “A 90s minimalism love story” with links to Bessette wardrobe dupes like a “Carolyn crewneck” and tortoiseshell headband.

Love Story cannily lifts the lid on a couple who were so ingrained in the American public imagination that, after their death in 1999, the New Yorker’s cover showed the Statue of Liberty wearing a black mourning veil. We know from the show’s first frames showing the couple boarding a light aircraft that this love story will not end well, but early episodes hit the frisky beats of a vintage romcom. Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) is edgy and droll: the type who can roll out of bed hungover, tousle her hair and still show up to her publicity job at Calvin Klein looking like she stepped out of a magazine. Next to her, JFK Jr (Paul Anthony Kelly) is a golden retriever whose suave suit belies his desire to delay his assigned fate as the heir of Camelot for as long as possible. Sparks fly between the couple after they meet at a gala, where Bessette toys with the mooning manchild and refuses to give him her phone number. “You know where I work,” she says, biting her lip.

She’s way too cool for him, and he knows it. In scenes that aim for and sometimes approach the sexy will-they-won’t-they frisson and eyeball-fucking of a Nora Ephron movie, JFK Jr pursues Bessette across the city, showers her with red roses, and makes overtures on moonlit walks through mysteriously trash-free streets (Murphy hates litter). Just as enjoyable are moments when the show leans into the heart-swelling big feelings of a Nicholas Sparks paperback: after one brief estrangement, JFK Jr bikes to Bessette’s place to declare his love for her in the pouring rain.

With no Murphy writing or directing credits, Love Story gains its deft balance of pulp and prestige from creator Connor Hines, a relative newcomer whose previous biggest writing gig was on Netflix’s sci-fi sitcom Space Force. From the jump, Hines knew that he wanted to bring JFK Jr and Bessette down to earth. “I’m not interested in a show about famous people,” he said. “I want it to just feel like you’re watching a boy and a girl figuring their shit out. He’s in his head and she’s in his head, and he hasn’t called and she hasn’t called … I want it to feel like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve been there, or I’ve sat there wondering.’”

Pidgeon is already tipped for an Emmy nomination (and likely a win) for her role as Bessette. She acts circles around Kelly, a former model who doesn’t quite have the panty-dropping magnetism of JFK Jr but does possess the square jaw and period accurate chest hair. “We live in a world of electrolysis men,” executive producer Brad Simpson told GQ. “It was a real challenge to find that sort of guy – a guy that women and gay men are attracted to, but also guys want to hang out and have a beer with.”

Other details take a fuzzier approach to fealty. Production designer Alex DiGerlando told Curbed that while they painstakingly recreated Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s manse from existing images, the interior of JFK Jr’s Tribeca apartment is a mystery. That gave set designers free rein to imagine it as a shrine to 90s minimalism with glass bricks and granite countertops. It is chic as hell, and probably far too sophisticated for the real life yankee bachelor with a big dog. Would America’s son really be uninhibited enough for a loft bedroom with no walls? It’s fun to imagine.

Not everyone is as enchanted. When asked about Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette in a recent interview, Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg was categorial. “I want people who watch the show to keep one letter in mind, and that’s F for fiction,” he said, adding of Murphy. “He’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.” In a New York Times op-ed, the actor and one-time JFK Jr girlfriend Daryl Hannah condemned her unflattering depiction as “tragedy-exploiting” and “textbook misogyny”.

The show works best if you make peace with it as glossy embellishment of one of the all-time great American myths. JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette were the closest thing that the US came to royalty, capturing the public imagination and enduring an emboldened paparazzi who tailed their every move. They were the perfect 90s gossip magazine fodder, feeding the rags’ appetite for candid paparazzi shots over styled red carpet images. It helped that they were stylish, young, and not afraid to get into a blazing argument in public. “You’re going to be the American people’s princess,” Bessette is informed as she prepares to marry JFK Jr on a remote Georgia island. She rolls her eyes at her friends before replying, “You two are demented.”

Almost as demented as imagining Bessette would be caught dead wearing Zara. When Ryan Murphy posted camera test pictures of Pidgeon as Bessette last year, fans slammed the costumes as looking suspiciously off-the-rack (“Shein Camelot” was my favorite of the snarky comments). Murphy listened, hiring a 10-person “style advisory board” who scoured eBay and borrowed for collectors to outfit Pidgeon in original Prada and Yohji Yamamoto pieces, as well as an Hermès Birkin that they artfully bashed-up to resemble the bag Bessette carried while taking the subway. It rarely pays off when shows pay too much attention to internet chatter, but Love Story’s style recalibration is a rare example of fan service that pays off.

Love Story arrives in the wake of a slew of dodgy 90s remakes and reboots like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream and The Crow, and with news that The X-Files and Clueless are up 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 tiny computers in our pockets that gave us minute-by-minute updates on all the awful things happening in the world. Perhaps that’s why Love Story feels like a glamorous off-switch for anxiety: it taps into a time when if you didn’t turn on the TV or stop at the newsstand that morning, you could simply tune the world out.

But in my mind the show’s masterstroke is not merely to recapture the decade but to auramaxx it. In Murphy and Hines’s hands, JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s romance is bigger, the streets are cleaner, apartments are chicer, and the couple are as beautifully doomed as the Lana Del Rey songs that accompany their fan edits. Love Story doesn’t offer a time machine back to the 90s. It makes it better.