Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Chris Revelle | TV | March 31, 2026
In the finale of FX’s Love Story, the Ryan Murphy-stamped re-enactment drama about the love and tragic death of Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr, we see the lead-up to and the aftermath of the fateful 1999 plane crash that also took the life of Carolyn’s sister, Lauren. On their way to Rory Kennedy’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, the plane JFK Jr. is piloting runs into a storm. The scene, a dramatized, fictionalized vision of a moment no one knows, distills all the series’ failings.
Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) moves from the back of the plane to join John (Paul Anthony Kelly) in the cockpit and holds his hand. They’ve recently reunited after falling out, but Love Story hasn’t built a legible emotional reality between them, so it’s hard to understand why. The series seems to suggest that their happy future lay in their sweeter past with their reminiscence of their first date, but does no work to explain it. When the trouble starts, John’s spatial disorientation makes it hard for him to right the plane. This moment could have let the viewers access some of John’s panic or determination. Instead, the prosaic writing and Kelly’s lukewarm acting only allow John a sense of befuddlement. Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) is an afterthought left at the back of the plane, largely ignored.
Love Story briefly picks at this notion of Lauren being forgotten. When their mother Ann (Constance Zimmer) is summoned by the Kennedy clan to discuss the burial, Lauren doesn’t even come up. Ann has to remind them that she lost two daughters in that crash and that both mattered. That’s certainly true, but Love Story itself largely forgot about Lauren. She didn’t exist as a character unto herself, she was just a sounding board for Carolyn. Lauren was especially reduced in this narrative, but pretty much all the characters on Love Story were underdeveloped figments.
That issue undermines every moment that should be emotionally resonant. When Ann argues that Lauren was reduced to a footnote and that Carolyn is being blamed for the accident, I can register this as unjust on an intellectual level, but not an emotional one. The series so utterly failed to give its characters any dimension that it blunts any impact this story might have. Later in the finale, Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) decides to buck the family’s edict and goes with Ann to scatter John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s ashes in the ocean. This could have shown some growth on Caroline’s part or some kind of turning point for her. Instead it just feels mechanical. Caroline’s actions were dictated by the whims of the plot, not any consistent characterization.
The final image of Carolyn and John standing on the beach in preppy knits made my eyes roll so hard that they pulled a muscle. Like Love Story as a whole, it says nothing. It isn’t calling back to a moment in their relationship, nor is it attempting to illustrate something about this couple. It’s an image that evokes a time period’s aesthetic and then runs out of ideas. It makes what the series claims to be their focus (a love story doomed by social failings of the time) a mere pretense to find some fun costumes and remind people what it was like to have smoking sections. It’s an alarming sign of vapidity when one of your lead actors is being outdone by the earrings she’s wearing.
Like with most other Murphy-inflected series of recent memory (Feud: Capote vs the Swans, The Watcher, all three Monster series), Love Story takes hold of interesting events and then has no real angle on them. Instead of a point of view, it’s just reenactment with liberal dollops of fantasy. The all-star casts do little to overcome the abysmal writing. Hiring Naomi Watts to play Jackie Onassis could have been interesting, but instead it’s an SNL character with prestige photography. I frankly don’t understand the point of retelling these stories if the creators don’t have anything to say about them. You might as well shoot a soap opera with Barbies in a dollhouse.
