Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette sells itself on one thing: the Kennedy name. That golden, cursed American dynasty that the public has never quite been able to let go of. The show, at its core, uses the most famous name in American political history to sell a story about a woman who tried to survive the press, public and the weight of a name that was never really hers. 

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, played by Sarah Pidgeon, enters the show as a celebrity publicist at Calvin Klein. A sharp and self-possessed woman who had built an identity that was entirely her own. The show tracks how that changes quietly, through small losses that accumulate over time. By the end of the show, her identity has been picked apart, piece by piece. Attending galas not as herself but as an accessory to the Kennedys. Her fashion career being shelved, photographers waiting for her outside every door. She watched herself be slowly consumed by the Kennedy orbit until there was no way out.

Some of the show’s best scenes surround Carolyn’s individuality, showing how vital she is to the narrative. Carolyn at the George gala, shoulders back, smile fixed and going through the motions of a life that no longer feels like hers. There’s a moment in episode eight where she breaks down in the apartment she shares with John, exhausted, telling him she feels like a hermit in her own home. The woman who once ran the room at Calvin Klein was reduced to being afraid of walking out her front door. Pidgeon plays this loss of identity without overselling it. There is no monologue where Carolyn announces she is losing herself. It just happens, the audience watching it helplessly, leaving us feeling devastated.

Meanwhile, Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr. is just fine. Charismatic enough, handsome enough, earnest enough. However, John’s character is frustratingly hollow, a man defined more by his myth than anything else. The show hints at his complexity: the weight of the Kennedy name, his doomed political ambitions and the launch of George, a lifestyle magazine blending politics and celebrity culture. Despite this, every time the audience gets close to something interesting about JFK Jr., it drifts back to Carolyn. Carolyn is fascinating, her story has far more at stake. 

This is the central contradiction of Love Story. It was approved and funded because of the Kennedy name, structured around his arc, yet it is most alive whenever the show loses sight of him as its protagonist. The irony is not subtle, nor should it be. Women adjacent to famous men have always been the more compelling story. Princess Diana, who was more beloved than the system she married into. Jackie, who held herself together in public after the assassination of her husband and everything fell apart. They are the individuals who had something to lose beyond a legacy that they were born into. These women are symbols of sacrifice, giving up their careers, privacy and sense of self, all just to stand beside someone the world had already decided mattered more. Later, Carolyn compares herself to Yoko Ono, positioning herself as the outsider blamed for disrupting a beloved American dynasty.

Love Story never fully examines this, which is its biggest missed opportunity. It shows Carolyn slowly disappearing without ever delving into the reason why. The press, the public, the Kennedy institution itself, and yes, the entertainment industry that continues to package her tragedy as a love story named for someone else. The women in these stories are always framed as supporting characters, even when they clearly define the narrative—existing as the centre of it all. They get the footnotes, the side plots and the titles that start with someone else’s name. Murphy still could not bring himself to put her name first in the title; that says everything. 

Love Story is a worthwhile watch, with Pidgeon's performance alone making it worth your time. The show accidentally makes a better case for Carolyn than it ever does for John. Carolyn, long treated as a footnote to the Kennedy legacy, turns out to be the show’s emotional centre, though the series itself only half realises this. It keeps reaching for the Kennedy story, although the more riveting story was always right there.