Critic’s Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
4.5
It’s been almost 27 years since John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, died, along with her sister, in a plane crash on the way to a wedding, yet their allure persists.
So much has happened since then that I’m struggling to wrap my head around writing a review of the first three episodes of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette.
I’m writing for two groups of people. Those who lived through it and those who didn’t. How do you paint a picture of what this couple meant when the times are so vastly different that it’s almost impossible to grasp?
(Courtesy of FX)
Love Story Season 1 Episode 1 opens on the last day of their lives, and it’s easy to get stuck there, in the tragedy of what we lost.
Thankfully, the series quickly jumps back seven years to give us a sense of who each of them was before they found each other. And that matters more than you realize.
I can remember when JFK Jr. failed the bar exam twice and rode his bicycle in the streets. The media might have enjoyed painting him as a failure just to take a jab at the Kennedy name, but I loved that he wasn’t perfect.
He was an interesting outlier in the Kennedy family because he refused to allow the constant public scrutiny to change him.
He felt its presence and had to maneuver within its imprint, but he was also unapologetically himself — just a young man trying to figure out where the hell he fit inside of the Kennedy machine and the world itself.
(Courtesy of FX)
And jumping ahead a bit, I think that’s what ultimately led to dissatisfaction in his marriage. Carolyn didn’t have a lifetime to figure out how to navigate the media machine that fueled Camelot.
The first three episodes do a good job of showing how that scrutiny was different for Jackie and Caroline and how it might sweep up Carolyn, no matter how hard she tried to escape it.
How the public treats women differs from how it treats men, even in similar situations. Jackie and Caroline abhorred living under a microscope and worked hard to keep things private. John just lived, paparazzi be damned. But he could. They allowed him that grace.
So what I want to do is paint a picture of why John and Carolyn were so important in their time. The series does such an excellent job of evoking the memories I had of them individually and as a couple, so I’m sure I’m not alone.
It’s also important to remember how much of the Kennedy children’s lives were guarded by Jackie’s presence. People respected her, and they wanted to be on her good side. They let her set the ground rules.
But when she died in 1994, something shifted. John was no longer buffered by her. The last guardian of Camelot was gone, and he was fully exposed. That it coincides with the beginning of his relationship with Carolyn is both symbolic and tragic, in retrospect.
(Courtesy of FX)
What’s even more fascinating about this story is that it began and ended long before the Internet was everywhere and cell phones were ubiquitous.
It’s almost impossible to impart to people today what it was like a mere 27 years ago, when information wasn’t at our fingertips 24/7.
Everything I knew about them, individually and together, was carefully curated by the media. Even paparazzi shots had to be purchased and published. There was no Facebook or Twitter. John and Carolyn were gone years before they launched.
There is a point in the premiere episodes where John admits to Carolyn that he isn’t sure how much of his childhood he remembers because so much of his story has been shared. Did he remember it, or was he exposed to it?
That’s what we’re seeing here, too. This is a story we may never fully understand, but we’re unlikely to stop trying.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
And it does make me feel somewhat icky that Ryan Murphy, of all people, who sexifies serial killers in his spare time, is the one producing this.
It feels wrong to revisit them in much the same way we can look back now and see how we contributed to their demise.
It didn’t escape me that John mentioned he was trying to get his pilot’s license because of how he was perceived flying domestically. Even he, who lived relatively easily under the public’s watch, wanted privacy when it mattered.
So how could we not feel culpable in some way? As if we were behind the wheel of the machine that took away their agency to live on their own terms?
But I also remember them for what they meant to us, even those of us who weren’t obsessed but saw the real people trying to live under the microscope. I found them interesting for who they were, not just what they represented.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
I subscribed to George. And I love that it was what he chose to do when he wanted to define himself: he found a way to combine pop culture and politics in a way that probably only he could have.
Even I felt proud that John was stepping out of his family’s shadow and making a name for himself.
And although we didn’t know Carolyn before John, many did, and the iciness the media clung to was much different than the woman herself. She was a fashion icon in her simplicity. Her beauty wasn’t covered in heavy makeup or excessive accessories. She let her essence shine.
Of course, others were attracted to that boldness, which to her wasn’t bold at all. And she made her living helping others find their style, which speaks volumes about her.
I loved how Carolyn made Annette Bening feel confident in her skin before the Bugsy premiere, and she did it with truth. She wasn’t selling Calvin Klein as much as helping his clients find which of his garments best reflected their own essence.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
Showing how she pushed for Kate Moss, a relative unknown at the time, for the Calvin Klein promotion, and then again for her on-again, off-again lover Michael Bergin, helped flesh out how much Carolyn believed in others and their talents, too. That’s an incredible power to have.
Love Story makes it easy to imagine how John and Carolyn fell for each other. John was used to things going his way. He hadn’t found love yet because he couldn’t be sure if they loved him or the Kennedy name.
The portrait of Daryl Hannah is hardly flattering. She comes off as vapid but secure in her celebrity. Surely, it was that second trait that attracted John. He knew well enough from the women in his life the pressures of the public eye.
But he wasn’t invested. Jackie certainly wasn’t a fan. And you know how unserious it was because John didn’t push the issue. If he had truly loved Daryl, he would have made more of an effort, I’d think.
The air around John and Carolyn was electric. She didn’t jump at his advances. She maintained a level of mystery that he couldn’t resist. She had seen how unserious he was about so many things, and she was somewhat guarded with her feelings.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
We don’t know how much of what is on screen was true to life, but we do know that they did that dance for two years before getting serious. That says plenty about their destiny.
I read some articles about John and Carolyn coming into the series, and I learned that Carolyn had a way of inviting people into her world through touch. Using that to draw in John on their first date for the series was perfect.
The look on John’s face when she reached across the table and placed her hand on him spoke volumes. They were lit up with a whimsical passion they couldn’t have understood at that point. Doing it under a glittering decor drove the point home.
This series wouldn’t have worked without John and Carolyn being perfectly cast.
You wouldn’t know that this is Paul Anthony Kelly’s second on-screen role. It’s almost ironic that he nabbed the part of a man who smoothly lived under the watchful gaze of the world when he’s so new to it.
(Courtesy of FX)
And I have no idea if he speaks like John in real life, but he captured the gentle lisp that made John’s speech so endearing. He seems comfortable in his own skin in much the same way John was, and since John spent a good portion of his life shirtless for the masses, it’s helpful.
Sarah Pidgeon is best known for The Wilds and Tiny Beautiful Things, and, like Kelly, she becomes the woman she portrays. She has the same easy elegance that needs few accoutrements to shine.
It’s important for iconic people to have a life of their own in adaptations of their lives, and their limited resumes work in their favor. I don’t think either one of them will be without work for the near future, as they prove they’re talent here and then some.
I understand why Jackie Kennedy has such a significant role in the series, but I don’t think it was essential. And if you had asked me to provide a list of women to play her, Naomi Watts wouldn’t have been on it.
But she does a convincing job as a mother wishing the best for her children, knowing full well that living under the Kennedy umbrella would never be easy for them.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
The best scene for Watts was when Jackie was burning mementos after learning of her illness. Protecting what little privacy she retained was important to her. But as much as she tried to impart that onto John, their circumstances were different.
Love Story Season 1 Episode 3 culminates with John and Carolyn’s first on-screen kiss and the beginning of their relationship. It’s hard to take all of that in after just seeing their final day together in the season opener, but it’s a perfectly dramatic turn.
That full arc of their beginning, when the dance begins, and it ends, makes dropping three episodes for the premiere purposeful, even if I’m not a fan.
I’m sorry if I’ve waxed poetic too long about what I recall and what’s on screen. But it does matter. Their imprint remains as if we had them all to ourselves. But we didn’t, and compared to today, what we didn’t know far outweighs what we did.
Back then, when something happened, the country stopped. We watched the same footage. We waited for the evening news. We refreshed nothing because there was nothing to refresh.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
Information arrived in waves, not drips. That waiting created a collective experience, and collectively, we all carry pieces of the Kennedy family and of John and Carolyn specifically in our hearts.
They arrived at a time we needed them, and how their future unfolds on screen over the coming weeks will be affected by many stories of the day, particularly the death of Princess Diana.
If Jackie’s death shifted the framework around her family, Diana’s death will take the obsession with John and Carolyn into unknown territory.
Love Story’s sense of place and time is extraordinary, evoking a feeling of walking beside the star-crossed lovers. The music and atmosphere are pitch-perfect, making it feel as if we’re all experiencing it together for the first time.
Like many love stories, this one won’t be perfect, but the imperfections of their relationship are what make it so fascinating, too. We see enough gloss today to last a million lifetimes, so revisiting a romance that blossomed during a simpler time is refreshing.
And it might even remind us to give people today a little grace as they live in a public that has been blown wide open for the masses, and possibly, even allow them some grace for themselves, too.
I hope you’ll be sticking around as we unpack it together.
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