“Love Story” (2026) opens outside a nail salon, where swarms of paparazzi wait to catch a glimpse of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (Sarah Pidgeon). The camera flashes through the window and reflects onto her freshly painted red nails, but the moment the nail technician finishes, Bessette asks for a neutral shade instead. No mundane moment involving Bessette escaped public intrigue, least of all the heated ones. Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr.’s (Paul Anthony Kelly) arguments were splashed across magazines while paparazzi camped outside their apartment around the clock. As the season progresses and Bessette grows more entangled with both JFK Jr. and the limelight surrounding him, one begins to see this opening scene as illustrative of a woman being controlled by the public eye, down to the color of her nails.
“Love Story” traces the relationship between JFK Jr. and Bessette, a couple who were resolutely private about their intimacy — which only made the public push harder for more. When cameras finally caught them in a heated argument in Central Park in 1996, it deepened the obsession and intrigue.
Nowadays, a tantalizing photograph of a celebrity couple’s spat is promptly contextualized in an Instagram reel or on a podcast episode. “Love Story,” by contrast, provides relief, transporting viewers to the analog ’90s before social media, iPhones, street vloggers and influencers existed. The series drifts into a gauzy, romantic ’90s minimalism and conjures the palette of New York with its classic mustard taxi cabs, high-society Manhattan and the Kennedy mythology.
Pidgeon’s Bessette is an independent, corporate-adjacent woman who smokes the occasional cigarette and gives nothing away. From the very start, Bessette refuses to give JFK Jr. her number, remarking coolly that he knows where to find her. Time and time again, she lets him initiate everything: He tracks down her workplace, calls repeatedly as she declines to pick up, sends roses she ignores and buys a suit just to earn a brief conversation. What keeps JFK Jr. hooked — the most eligible bachelor and PEOPLE’s 1988 Sexiest Man Alive — is that Bessette refuses to be swept up in his gravity.
The real Bessette was just as withholding, leaving almost nothing behind. She refused interviews and wore the same outfit every day, hoping identical paparazzi photos would eventually bore the press into leaving her alone. Yet they didn’t, and avid watchers are rushing to replicate the look even today. As Pidgeon said in an interview with E! News, Bessette’s insistence on privacy “made it easier for narratives and characterizations to be projected onto her and therefore onto them as a couple.” Tabloids in the ’90s branded her as the “Ice Queen,” a vixen, an opportunist, which were projections that had little to do with the woman Elizabeth Beller describes in “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” — one of the show’s main sources of inspiration. Beller depicts her as spunky, vivacious, humorous and quick-witted.
Kelly’s JFK Jr. dons backward Kangol hats, rides his bike through Tribeca, forgets to lock it, plays football in Central Park and forgets to mention that the party he’s invited Bessette to is his sister’s birthday dinner. He is spur-of-the-moment and occasionally reckless — and why shouldn’t he be? Though JFK Jr.’s unique masculinity and swagger remain, as always, impossible to fully replicate, Kelly inhabits the spontaneous side of JFK Jr. — a man constitutionally unburdened by consequence, who was not above stripping off his shirt to exercise in Central Park when the tabloids needed to be fed, throwing himself into risky adventures and trusting luck to handle his fate. Bessette had no name, money or myth to live that kind of recklessness. She was Manhattan-made and hardworking, so one could argue that her resistance to his wooing was not out of coyness but an effort to buy time to decide whether she could survive a life inside his gravity.
It’s worth remembering that “Love Story” is explicitly fiction. The show is an act of imagination built upon the negative space the couple deliberately left behind. “Love Story” is just another projection among the many tabloids, rumor-mongering labels and descriptions of the couple — this time dressed in Calvin Klein fabric and the nicotine tint of pre-ban Manhattan air — produced by Ryan Murphy. His previous series, “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (2020), drew criticism due to Murphy’s failure to notify the victims’ families of the production. “Love Story” has also received criticism, with JFK Jr.’s nephew Jack Schlossberg excusing the show for inaccurately portraying his uncle’s life.
