‘FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette’ – A Seductive Slow-Burn Love Tale in The Time of Flashbulbs – Review

Over Valentine’s weekend, romance arrived not as a whisper, but as a full-body experience. In cinemas, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights howled across the moors, selling out sessions and unleashing a storm of yearning, discourse, and borderline feral TikTok devotion. Meanwhile, at home, audiences were drawn into something sleeker, sexier, and infinitely more dangerous: FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, now streaming on Disney+.

If Wuthering Heights offered operatic obsession, Love Story delivers something colder, sharper, and more intoxicating — a portrait of love lived under surveillance, desire shaped by legacy, and intimacy fought for in the harsh glare of flashbulbs. This isn’t just a romance; it’s a cultural autopsy of the 1990s, when glamour and intrusion walked hand in hand.

Inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the series captures the lightning-strike chemistry between John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly), America’s closest thing to royalty, and Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon), a fiercely independent fashion force whose elegance and restraint made her an icon in her own right.

A Myth Rewound to the Moment Before the Fall

Set against the shimmering backdrop of 1990s New York, Love Story retraces the magnetic, volatile romance between America’s Prince, John F. Kennedy Jr., and fashion it-girl turned reluctant icon, Carolyn Bessette. It’s a relationship that has long lived in the realm of myth; frozen in paparazzi stills, cigarette smoke, and whispered envy — but here, it’s allowed to breathe.

This series marks the final production from super-producer Ryan Murphy, the architect of pop-culture juggernauts like Glee and American Crime Story. But where those shows thrived on spectacle and scandal, Love Story is something different: restrained, intimate, and quietly devastating.

Murphy isn’t interested in rushing headlong toward tragedy. Instead, he luxuriates in the moments before everything fractures, allowing us to sit inside the romance as it grows, deepens, and slowly begins to strain under the weight of expectation.

The Power of the Slow Burn

In an era of binge-ready melodrama, Love Story plays the long game. The early episodes are patient, almost languid, carefully constructing the emotional architecture of its central relationship. We’re invited to understand not just the lovers, but the ecosystem surrounding them — the media machine, the fashion industry, the Kennedy legacy, and the quiet, constant pressure to perform.

Yes, we know how this ends. But the series understands that inevitability is not the point. What matters is how love survives, or doesn’t, when privacy becomes impossible and identity is forever up for public negotiation. The tension doesn’t come from what will happen, but from watching two people desperately try to hold onto something real.

Sarah Pidgeon: Cool, Closed-Off, and Compelling

As Carolyn Bessette, Sarah Pidgeon delivers a performance of remarkable restraint. Draped in minimalist black, Birkin bag swinging like armour, Pidgeon captures the paradox at the heart of Bessette; a woman who became a style icon precisely because she refused to perform.

Working at Calvin Klein and navigating the upper echelons of New York fashion, Carolyn is ambitious but guarded, luminous yet deeply private. Pidgeon plays her not as a cipher, but as someone still forming herself in real time — unsure of who she is, even as the world insists on defining her.

There’s a tension in her performance between desire and retreat, between wanting love and fearing annihilation by it. It’s magnetic to watch, and quietly heartbreaking.

An American Prince with Cracks Beneath the Smile

Opposite her, newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly steps into the near-mythic role of JFK Jr. with surprising nuance. He has the looks, the grin, the inherited ease, but this isn’t a man content to coast on legacy.

As the son of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, JFK Jr. exists in a constant state of performance, acutely aware of what he represents. Kelly plays him as restless, searching, and quietly exhausted by expectation.
In Carolyn, he glimpses the possibility of anonymity; or at least honesty. Their connection feels real because it’s rooted in shared vulnerability, even as the outside world conspires to make that vulnerability impossible.

Chemistry That Smoulders, Then Burns

The chemistry between Pidgeon and Kelly is undeniable. Their romance unfolds in glances, pauses, stolen moments, and eventually, in passion that feels earned rather than engineered. Murphy doesn’t shy away from the sensuality of their connection: Love Story is intimate, tactile, and emotionally charged.

When the series leans into romance, it does so without apology. This is love that consumes, that disrupts, that threatens to derail carefully constructed identities. And when it ignites, it burns hot.

The Orbits of Power and Control

Two towering figures loom large over the series, adding depth and tension: Jackie Kennedy Onassis and fashion titan Calvin Klein, portrayed by Naomi Watts and Alessandro Nivola respectively.

Watts’ Jackie is polished, perceptive, and quietly formidable. Fiercely loving yet deeply strategic, she understands better than anyone the cost of public life. Her presence is both protective and suffocating, a reminder that legacy is never neutral.

Nivola’s Calvin Klein, meanwhile, represents the ruthless machinery of fashion. He recognises Carolyn’s power instantly, not just as talent, but as image. His interest is transactional, his gaze always fixed on the bottom line, even when it threatens to fracture her personal life.

1990s New York, Perfectly Preserved

One of Love Story’s greatest strengths is its recreation of 1990s New York. This isn’t nostalgia by numbers — it’s textured, lived-in, and sensorial. From candlelit restaurants to paparazzi-choked sidewalks, the city feels alive, dangerous, and seductive.

The fashion, overseen by costume designer Ridy Mance, is nothing short of immaculate. Working with collectors to source original pieces worn by Bessette-Kennedy herself, the series achieves an authenticity that borders on obsessive. Every look tells a story, and both leads wear the era like second skin.

Final Verdict: A Romance That Lingers

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette has all the ingredients of a compulsive watch: glamour, sex, tragedy, and myth — but what elevates it is its emotional intelligence. This is a series about love under pressure, identity in flux, and the brutal cost of being seen.

Romantic, melancholic, and utterly absorbing, Love Story doesn’t just revisit a famous relationship — it makes you feel it. And long after the final episode fades to black, its ache lingers, like the echo of a camera shutter snapping just a moment too late.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is streaming NOW on Disney+.

Image: Walt Disney Pictures