Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette biopic misses the irony of its own criticism

John F. Kennedy Jr was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors in the 1980s and early 1990s.

He had his father’s bearing and hair and his mother’s eyes, the son of a murdered president and the heir to Camelot. The closest thing the US had to a veritable prince.

He didn’t chose to be born into his family, but he grew up with some understanding of what it entailed to be a Kennedy, part of a legacy that his overly ambitious grandfather, Joe Kennedy, started.

Carolyn Bessette was born to a middle class family with no connections to the political elite. She was reportedly popular in school, was voted “Ultimate Beautiful Person” by her classmates in that strange American yearbook tradition, and went to university in Boston, studying education.

The only reason she was even in a similar social circle to JFK Jr was she worked closely with Calvin Klein as a publicist at his label, after her keen instincts was spotted by a company executive who chanced upon her at one its retail stores in Massachusetts.

When Bessette married JFK Jr in 1996 in an intimate wedding held on an inaccessible island, she was a private citizen. She didn’t grow up in the world of constant scrutiny, a throng of paparazzi stalking her every move, effectively rendering her under house arrest, or being the subject of judgement about everything she did or didn’t do.

That transition into the deranged fishbowl of hyper-security forms a big part of the biopic miniseries, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette.

Ironically, the thing the show wants to explore, almost high-mindedly, is the thing it’s guilty of itself.

Let’s rewind a little bit.

The series starts seven years before the 1999 plane accident that killed the couple and Bessette’s sister Lauren, when it crashed into the water at night with JFK Jr at the wheel. A crash report would later determine the probable cause to the pilot error.

The tragic end and how it fits into a larger narrative of the so-called Kennedy curse is also why the JFK Jr and Bessette story has stayed in the public consciousness for the past quarter of a century.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette is the first instalment in an anthology series from producer Ryan Murphy, whose other collections include American Horror Story, American Crime Story, American Sports Story and Feud

The show itself is standard soapy drama as the two circle each other for a few episodes, eventually coming together and then have to reckon with whether their relationship will survive the changes that she has to make to fit into his life, while he has made few if any accommodations.

This is not going to be everyone’s thing, but there will be a subset of audiences who love basic biopic fare, especially when it’s centred on a person who used to be splashed across the cover of magazines at the supermarket check-out. If that’s you, well, you know.

The more interesting question this series raises is whether it’s right that Bessette’s story be dramatised to such an extent where almost an entire episode consists of an imagined fight between the couple not long after the marriage, in which the Bessette character lays bare so many vulnerabilities about how her identity has been subsumed as just being part of his.

It’s a bruising fight, but it’s a depiction of the innermost fears of someone who never asked to be the subject of a biopic.

Biopics are common, and we’ve seen shows and films such as The Crown or Bohemian Rhapsody do exactly this thing, where they go behind closed doors and tease what might’ve happened or had been said, rather than historical fidelity. It’s part of the tropes.

But those were public figures. Some, celebrities, chose that life, thought you would doubt any of them chose for that level of intrusion, while others, such as the British royals were born into.

The latter spend their whole life preparing for it and have the benefit of publicly funded lives and security.

Bessette just married into it. You may believe that even making that choice binds you into some contract in which you forfeit your right to privacy or agency over your life, but that’s unkind. And women in those situations are subjected to far worse treatment than men.

So, there is definitely an ethic cloud around even the existence of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Even more so when you consider that it makes that debate part of its story themes, but obviously doesn’t examine its own complicity.

While it was still in production, Murphy released a series of camera tests featuring the two lead actors, Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, in costume. The internet, including fashion publications and Bessette’s former colourist excoriated the choices of hair, clothing and accessories.

Bessette was a style icon with her sleek, minimalist looks, and her sartorial preferences were well-documented. Those early production photos didn’t fit. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette recognised this and eventually replaced the costume designer and changed it all up.

But Murphy was incensed at the reaction and accused the internet of bullying Pidgeon. “They’re doing to our Carolyn what they did to the real-life Carolyn. It’s not fair,” he cried to Variety.

That’s incredibly rich coming from Murphy whose works have triggered vociferous opposition from the real-life families of people he’s depicted, including the kin of the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer who objected to Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.

Bessette still has surviving family who since the plane crash where they lost two daughters and sisters, have never re-emerged publicly despite intrepid reporters trying to track them down, who will inevitably try again thanks to the renewed publicity cycle from this series.

Will they now spend the next few months dodging questions about how much the show “got right” or avoiding social media lest they have to see a meme?

Then, in all this, there’s also Caroline Kennedy, JFK Jr’s sister and former ambassador to Australia.

Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg of cancer in late-December, and is now faced with the fact this series, in which she’s played by Grace Gummer as pretty cold, is out in the world while she is, undoubtedly still grieving a tremendous loss.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette rehashes not just the death of her brother and her sister-in-law, but also of their mother, Jackie Kennedy (Naomi Watts), in a melodramatic episode that one wouldn’t call good television.

The timing of the release, while set months ago before Tatiana Schlossberg’s death, is awkward and more than a bit icky.

In June, Kennedy’s son, Jack Schlossberg, revealed the family were not consulted by the series producers and that because JFK Jr was a public figure, there is not much that can done.

“For the record, I think admiration for my Uncle John is great. What I don’t think is great is profiting off it in a grotesque way,” he said.