‘Love Story’: John Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette, or when headlines ruin everything that could, for once, be real

They only meant to take a small plane to Cape Cod to attend a cousin’s wedding. Nothing should have gone wrong. But it did. An experienced pilot — as experienced as an amateur pilot can be — John (Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.) Didn’t want to wait for the instructor that July afternoon. He didn’t need to. He had argued with Carolyn (Bessette), his wife, before boarding the Piper Saratoga that would end up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

It was a summer day. July 16. July 16, 1999. John and Carolyn had been married for three years. She was 33; John, 38. Also on the plane was Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, 34. The sky didn’t seem to foretell any storm. But once they took off, things got complicated. The plane disappeared 7.5 miles from its destination. Their bodies were found three days later on the ocean floor. That is how Love Story (Disney+) begins.

The starting point of Ryan Murphy’s new anthology venture — titled, yes, Love Story (first came American Horror Story, then American Crime Story, and now there’s even an American Sports Story in the works), and centered on the hyper‑exposed romance between Kennedy Jr. And Bessette — is the accident that cost the newly married couple their lives.

From there, it jumps back to the beginning of their relationship, when she, a former Calvin Klein sales associate in Boston, had just been promoted to public relations director in New York. And although one hopes for the return of the iconoclastic Murphy — the more than postmodern, hyper‑postmodern one — the classicism that permeated his second Feud — the one about Truman Capote and his Swans, his fabulously wealthy best friends — is everywhere, and worse yet, simplified.

And Ryan Murphy isn’t even at the helm of this Love Story. He is the executive producer. The person directing the adaptation — the story is based on Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller, essentially a biography of the relationship — is Connor Hines, a newcomer with barely 3,000 Instagram followers.

Murphy had already tested this strategy with the American Horror Story spinoff, where he put the series in the hands of very young new directors. What’s fascinating is that although what we see are simple shots — some powerful ones in true Murphy style — there’s a sense of familiarity, the familiarity of the franchise, something like a school Murphy is building in plain sight without the world fully realizing it. Which is, in itself, an extraordinary achievement. He’s giving people opportunities.

The result? Having seen the entire season, it’s frankly good, though uneven. At times, you’d think Love Story is a crude imitation, a flawed version of the Murphy who once aimed for excellence, but it is also — and above all — a copy of the most melodramatically classicist Murphy, the one from the aforementioned Feud about Truman Capote.

The script suffers from clichés and, in fact, many of the conversations — always between two characters — are nothing more than overused maxims, didactic lines, slogan‑like phrases that pull the characters completely out of their context. Or they would, if the characters weren’t played by giants like Naomi Watts, who devours the experiment in the role of an incomparable Jackie Kennedy Onassis. It’s truly something out of this world.

And the rest? Sarah Pidgeon (as Carolyn Bessette), Paul Anthony Kelly (as John Kennedy), and above all Grace Gummer (as Caroline Kennedy) operate at a supernatural level, carrying the drama with considerable chemistry: the kind that emerges between someone who knows exactly who they are and someone who never will.

It’s a drama that above all explores what happens when your life stops belonging to you, or how one can exist while being a public figure. Fame is the monster that turns you into anything at all — you’ll see what happens the first time Carolyn lands on a magazine cover — and destroys everything in its path, starting with what created it: your family, your new boyfriend, your career. Headlines don’t tend to respect the famous. Oh, no. They can’t allow them to have what everyone else has, that thing John and Carolyn were searching for: something real.

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