Love Story

The Flashbulb and the Fishbowl

I tense up whenever a series decides to build itself around a real-life fatal accident. *Love Story*, Connor Hines’ new nine-episode anthology about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, opens in exactly the place you expect it to: July 1999, with John, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren getting ready for the flight that will kill them. Then it stops short. The camera pulls away before the crash and rewinds to the early 90s instead. I’m not sure that restraint is enough to scrub off the usual Ryan Murphy-adjacent whiff of exploitation, but it does suggest Hines is reaching for something a little less ghoulish.



The public story around this couple has always been maddeningly shallow. He was America’s prince in the backward cap; she was the cold blonde the tabloids blamed for everything. Working from Elizabeth Beller's recent biography, Hines pushes hard against that ugly 90s misogyny. Carolyn becomes the real center of gravity here: a Calvin Klein publicist with a sharp sense of self, gradually crushed by a media machine that won’t leave her alone. The paparazzi aren’t treated as mere background nuisance, either. The show frames them like a swarm. In one scene, the buzzer sounds in John and Carolyn's loft, and the jagged punch of it lands like a horror cue.

Sarah Pidgeon, fresh off a Tony nomination for *Stereophonic*, carries that dread in her body more than in the dialogue. She doesn’t just suggest Carolyn’s reluctance; she turns it physical. Look at the way her shoulders draw up and her neck goes stiff right before she steps outside into the camera flashes. It becomes a portrait of someone constantly measuring the cost of simply being seen, and realizing that her presence alone has become a problem for everyone around her. *Time Magazine* hit the nail on the head, calling the show a "surprisingly restrained fusion of *The Crown*’s later seasons and a Murphyverse obsessed with reframing 20th century American mythology."



Whether the romance itself ever really catches fire is another matter, and it mostly comes down to how much cool distance you can tolerate. Paul Anthony Kelly has John’s anxious charm and impossible jawline, but something guarded lingers between the leads. They are beautiful together on screen, no question, yet the emotional pull seldom keeps pace with the imagery. As *Paste*’s Lacy Baugher Milas accurately complained, the show "doesn't even manage to be all that romantic." That feels right to me. The series is so busy unpacking the *idea* of John and Carolyn, and the suffocating weight of the Kennedy myth, with Naomi Watts looming elegantly as Jackie Onassis, that it sometimes skips the simpler question of why these two people reached for each other at all.



Maybe that absence is the point. The tragedy of *Love Story* isn’t only the plane crash waiting at the end. (We all know how this ends.) The deeper sadness is watching two people try to make a private life in a glass house while the world keeps rapping its knuckles against the walls. By the time I finished the last episode, I wasn’t swept up in some doomed fairytale. I just felt worn out for them.