With the fifth installment of his bingeable American Story anthology, Ryan Murphy has pulled off the impossible: he has managed to make one of his own stories — much less one about the Kennedys — a snoozefest. Love Story, Murphy’s fictionalization of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, is anything but a romance; worse, for the prolific producer, it’s a drama that’s shockingly boring.
In Murphy’s telling, John-John, played by professional model Paul Anthony Kelly, who has the Bouvier looks to match, is a mere himbo with a heart of gold, a well-intentioned Adonis who can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the big bad press that has the audacity to photograph him as he bikes, runs, and models through Manhattan. Carolyn, played by Tony nominee Sarah Pidgeon, is an effortless “cool girl” who just so happened to fall for the first son, only to find herself duped into believing the publicity she definitely didn’t want would die down after she finally and begrudgingly says, “I do.”
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To his credit, Murphy and his stars nail the aesthetics. After the showrunner published a much-mocked screen test of his starring couple last year in decidedly un-Bessette-Kennedy styling, Murphy clearly went back to the drawing board to emerge with two leads with the dimensional Bergdorf blonde, ’90s high-low style, and elocution to match their real-life inspirations to a T.
The problem with the show is everything else. As uncannily similar as Pidgeon and Kelly present and sound like CBK and JFK Jr., nothing else really rings true or is true. The real Bessette-Kennedy reportedly pursued Kennedy with the intention of graduating from mere upper-middle-class comfort to celebutante status. Her alleged physical abuse of both JFK Jr. and past paramours is whitewashed or erased from the story, as is her alleged escalating abuse of cocaine into her 30s. Kennedy’s lifetime of exorbitant privilege is played for giggles rather than for the danger that made him incapable of coping with a modicum of real-world adversity. None of his recklessness, his arguably intentional disregard for the safety of others in his pursuit of feeling agency or anything, really, is explored in a script that can only vilify external forces into comic book caricatures (an invented bimbo named “Darryl Hannah” who bears no similarity to the actress of the same name, the media, etc.) rather than consider that our lead Kennedys themselves had streaks of villainy blended with their charisma.
Then there is the Kennedy family itself. Although Jack Schlossberg, John’s nephew and the most shamelessly public nepo baby of the brood’s millennial generation, has excoriated Murphy for failing to bend the knee to the Kennedys and obtain their permission and input for the show, Murphy’s story seems oddly deferential to the official narrative. Especially compared to his brutally honest and fearless excoriations of former President Bill Clinton, lawyer Johnnie Cochran, and a bevy of historically lionized men who deserved Murphy’s re-reckonings, Murphy’s presentation of the Kennedys is disappointingly toothless.
It’s not that the series entirely ignores the flaws of Clan Kennedy. During a Hyannis Port dinner from hell, the script winks at the audience with an allusion to Michael Kennedy’s eventual affair with a 14 year-old family babysitter (read: statutory rape) while Ethel Kennedy luxuriates in her role as the head bully in charge, responsible for ensuring that the rest of the Kennedy spawn remind in-laws that they aren’t truly one of the family’s own.
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But Ethel Kennedy was worse than a mean girl. She was a negligent, indulgent enabler of a literally and figuratively toxic home and brood so unruly and criminal that Jackie Onassis tried her damndest to keep her own children away from the RFK cousins. I suppose the timeline of the show allows Murphy to exclude Ted Kennedy leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown, the forced lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy, or the paralysis of Pamela Kelley by Joe Kennedy II. But what excuse does Murphy have to ignore the fact that at his 40-person wedding that excluded most of the bride’s family and much of his own, John Kennedy invited William Kennedy Smith, the cousin whose rape trial he proudly showed up at to express his support?
In the case of the Kennedys, the truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Perhaps one day we’ll get the show we deserve, but Love Story, which is too scared of its own shadow and the very real power the Kennedys still possess, is not it.
