If you are looking for a break in the clouds from this terrible news cycle, can I direct you towards Love Story, the nine-part series executive-produced – but crucially, not written! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You might think this isn’t for you, that it’ll be too tabloidy or that you’re not interested in JFK Jr. But while Love Story, which takes us back to a very particular version of early-1990s New York, might not seem like the show we want right now, it is exactly the show that we need.
This probably sounds like a heartless summary of a true story that ends in the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while flying his wife and her sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light aircraft, killing everyone on board). But that tragic end only suffuses the preceding nine hours of storytelling with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just the thing to see off the iron-grey wash of today’s reality. The New York of Love Story isn’t the city’s current iteration, with its impossible rents and charmless finance bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the 1990s New York of, say, Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump strides through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster.
Instead, Love Story takes place in the stylised New York of Kate Moss, freshly discovered at Calvin Klein; it’s lunch at the Four Seasons and dinner at Indochine. It’s an excellent Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, standing in the street using one of those half-enclosed pay phones, and Sarah Pidgeon, excellent as Bessette, blowing smoke through the three-inch crack of a window. Before this show, I harboured absolutely no nostalgia for smoking in offices or anywhere else. Now, apparently, scenes of people blowing smoke indoors make me sigh with sadness. (Ditto the wearing of black capri pants and loafers.)
I wasn’t aware of being nostalgic for the Kennedy dynasty, either. But there’s something weirdly moving about looking back to an era in which the worst thing a Kennedy did was wear his baker boy cap backwards and fail his New York bar exam – rather than, say, back vitamins as a treatment for measles during a surge of cases in the US.
View image in fullscreenPaul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr and Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis in Love Story. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/FX
This misty-eyed feeling is part of the broader revival of 90s nostalgia being pushed by gen Z yearning for what looks, to them, like a simpler, pre-internet time when people managed to meet up with each other without sending 500 texts documenting each stage of their journey, and you could ground yourself in the tangible pleasures of vinyl LPs. As such, people have been losing their minds about Love Story since it launched on Hulu and Disney+ last month. Here’s the New York Times this week with a handy guide to Bessette’s wardrobe. British Vogue has gone deep on the show’s costumes which, after paparazzi shots of cheaply and inaccurately dressed cast members were widely shared and mocked when the show first started filming, ended up being sourced via eBay, Etsy and a callout to fashion collectors. Real estate websites have gone in hard on the production design, while the soundtrack – highlights include Lenny Kravitz, En Vogue and Björk – keeps trending. When, in episode four, Madonna’s 1994 anthem Secret starts playing, you may cry for more innocent times.
Also key to its charm: Love Story understands the sensibilities of those most likely to love it and gives us exactly what we need. Namely, Naomi Watts, aged up to play Jackie O in her dying days, landing a performance somewhere between Edie Beale and Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek. In one scene, Watts, cigarette in hand, sways gently along to Richard Burton’s finale from the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot while gazing at an oil painting of her late husband JFK. “It was supposed to be both of us that day in Dallas!” she whispers and exits left, via hearse, to the strains of Ave Maria.
Of course, not everyone loves it. Jack Schlossberg, nephew of JFK Jr and the latest pretender to the JFK throne, who is running for a Congressional seat in New York, doesn’t like the show at all. He told CBS: “If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy.” One absolutely sympathises. Shows like Love Story are monstrously presumptuous and unforgivably glib. And yet, give it one episode and I defy you not to swoon and keep watching.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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