American GOTHIC

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were a seemingly perfect couple who met a perfectly tragic ending.

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CHRIS MURPHY explains why we're still obsessed with them and introduces Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, who bring the doomed pair back to life in Ryan Murphy's Love Story

You already know how the story ends. On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr.—the son of JFK and Jackie O—and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, died when the small plane John was flying crashed somewhere off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Carolyn’s older sister, Lauren, was also on the plane and perished in the crash as well. It took five days for authorities to recover their bodies from the ocean floor.

That’s the tragic conclusion Ryan Murphy’s newest TV series inevitably hurtles toward—and also where it begins. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette opens with the doomed couple’s rather mundane final moments on the ground. Carolyn switches her nail color from a bold red to a blander shade; John hobbles out of his George magazine office wearing a cast on his left ankle due to a paragliding accident. They can’t stop bickering once they arrive at the tarmac—their relationship seemingly on the brink as they prepare for what would be their last flight.

It’s hard to overstate John and Carolyn’s tangible influence on New York in the 1990s—how different their era was from today’s fractured media landscape. From birth, John had been America’s first son, the boy who saluted his father’s coffin. Now that he was all grown up, the tabloids followed his every move. Sometimes they were complimentary—he was the fourth guy ever to be named People’s Sexiest Man Alive. Other times, not so much. After John failed the New York State bar exam for the second time, the New York Daily News ran a stinging headline: “The Hunk Flunks...Again.”