What is Love Story?
This February, Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, an anthology focusing its first season on the romance and relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, premiered on FX and Hulu. While critics, the general audience and my mom and I liked it, it has faced much criticism for embellished aspects of the story that were implied to be factual, offensive portrayals of actual people and the exploitation of the deceased. So, what did Love Story get wrong? What did it get right? And what is the drama surrounding it?
Reviews
While the project has been surrounded by controversy, it is much more respectful toward the people it portrays than I expected from a show produced by Ryan Murphy (most famous for Glee, American Crime Story, American Horror Story and Monster). Reviews were mixed but leaned toward positivity. In any depiction of the dead, there is bound to be push-back, which the show received much of, despite the fact that it is still one of the most-watched shows on Hulu right now and has garnered attention and praise from many.
Critiques
As previously implied, Ryan Murphy has a history of using the real-life stories of victims and dramatizing them in a way that angers many. The most egregious example of this is his Netflix series Monster, an anthology depicting famous American killers including Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein. Murphy received a lot of flak for humanizing Dahmer in the first season and villainizing the Menendez brothers in the second. The families of victims called the series “insensitive.” Despite the backlash, it wasn’t canceled. Now, the friends and families of JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette and other people depicted in the series have come forward to speak out against the show.
John Jr.’s nephew, political commentator Jack Schlossberg, said, “I would just want people who do watch the show to watch it with one letter in mind, and that’s a capital F for fiction. The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.” He is not the only person to voice his distaste for the series. Actress Daryl Hannah wrote a guest piece for the New York Times titled “How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With This?” where she puts all those involved on blast, particularly for the show’s offensive portrayal of her as JFK Jr.’s ‘clingy ex’.
Historical Inaccuracies
The show was obviously inspired by true events, but was created by people who didn’t truly know JFK Jr. or Carolyn Bessette, which, combined with fulfilling the narrative the show was trying to construct, led to a lot of misrepresentations of actual people and events. The show does a good job portraying Carolyn’s iconic style throughout the 1990s; it portrays the private nature of their relationship and wedding, as well as the media harassment the two (particularly Carolyn) faced. The show depicts the struggles they faced between relationship turmoil and family pressures, and the devastating plane crash in which the couple and Carolyn’s sister Lauren died. Aside from this, the show is mostly fictional.
The show added fights between characters that were never confirmed to have happened; they exaggerated and fictionalized much of John Jr.’s relationship with Daryl Hannah. They reinvented the Kennedy family dynamics and added certain events and behaviors that were denied by those who were close to the couple. This includes fights, substance usage and personality traits that were reconstructed for the sake of creating drama, tension and furthering the story. The Kennedy family maintains that the show should be seen as fiction, not a historical lesson. While the show does begin with a disclaimer stating that the show is “dramatized or fictionalized,” there is never any indication to the viewers of what is and isn’t true, which becomes somewhat of a problem when you’re depicting real people whose friends and family are still around to see it.
Is it Worth a Watch?
Would I recommend the show? Actually, yes. As long as you don’t go into it with the perception that it is some type of historical reenactment, but rather a largely embellished tale of a tragic love story, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy it. Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly do a phenomenal job in their portrayals of Bessette and Kennedy, and the two actors have amazing chemistry. The show is filmed in a very cool stylistic way, and the outfits are obsession-worthy. It’s the best thing Ryan Murphy has put out in a very long time (which, sure, is somewhat of a low bar given how bad the latest American Horror Story seasons have been, as well as his controversial work on Monster and his terrible legal drama starring Kim Kardashian called All’s Fair) and it is one of the greatest shows to come out so far this year. At the end of the day, the show only aims to do one thing: entertain, and it succeeds.