Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette

Together, Pigeon and Kelly have fantastic chemistry. .... Yet, it’s not the central pair who deliver the show’s most captivating performances: it’s the women who surround John F. Kennedy Jr. who take the cake as this series’ most interesting players. .... Nothing about this series feels cheap.

Somehow, despite a degree of current-day Kennedy fatigue, this FX series feels fresh and compelling.

The series is a respectful, sincere and humanized portrayal of a couple who were loved and mourned by the whole of America.

A compellingly voyeuristic drama.

A full-fat romantic drama that embraces the genre’s most enchanting tropes — the rain-soaked kiss, the reformed rake, the tasteful displays of wealth — while grounding them in just enough streetwise reality to make the fantasy feel all the more tangible.

Overall, “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” is a thoughtful show that centers on the sacrifice of long-term commitment, chemistry, incompatibility and the thunderous chaos of fame.

Love Story strikes a balance between historical accuracy and creative liberty to offer a fresh perspective on events that many viewers remember all too vividly.

With only a few dips into crass sensationalism, this love story starring Paul Anthony Kelly and a standout star-is-born Sarah Pidgeon lets us share in John and Carolyn’s one brief shining moment and ache for what might have been.

That obsession with committing the tabloid version of the story to film is what most kneecaps "Love Story," and prevents a very good show from being a great one. It's easy to tell when the show pivots from thoughtful to artificial, from feeling to faux.

Pidgeon’s Carolyn isn’t quite an underdog; she’s more of a Cinderella who really likes nice things. Kelly’s Kennedy is, well, very handsome. These aren’t great performances, but they convey something essential about the show’s worldview, if you can call it that.

Decrying tabloids even as it embraces their peek-behind-the-curtain spirit, it’s a People magazine feature in TV form.

Sometimes veers toward the overstated and melodramatic. .... “Love Story” is best at showing how damaging and merciless the scrutiny can get for the rich and famous and those thrown into it all without a life vest.

As the couple repeatedly state their love for each other, fall out and make up over nine — yes, nine — episodes, their relationship does start to feel like an “endless saga” (one character actually yells this).

Kelly and Pidgeon’s chemistry is stronger as adversaries than as lovers, and both are excellent in later episodes at conveying a marriage cracking under the pressures of its own myth. But the show seems unclear about what sort of message it’s meant to convey about the couple at its center, leaving one of history’s most talked-about relationships as elusive and unknowable here as it was in life.

“Love Story” starts off as a glamorous, tantalizing modern fairy tale before devolving into a rather heavy-handed analysis of familial expectation and the perils of fame.

Even for Camelot completists, it’s a bit of a snooze.

This results in a surprisingly restrained fusion of The Crown’s later seasons and a Murphyverse obsessed with reframing 20th century American mythology—a story that contains many strong elements but doesn’t dig deep enough to avoid tedium.

If Hines and his collaborators had been daring enough to turn their own cameras more frequently on Carolyn and less on John, perhaps we could have truly felt what it was like to be in Carolyn's head, a place Pidgeon does her level best to center us, when her sense of normalcy imploded. Love Story gives us a sense of what that might have looked like, but it can't make us understand how it really felt.

“Love Story” can’t capture John and Carolyn’s relationship with any flesh-and-blood humanity. It worships at the altar of reenactment, so when it’s time to depict the happenings that haven’t been splashed across the New York Post, the dolls don’t know what to do. Their performers don’t exactly liven things up.

Ultimately, it is Pidgeon’s Bessette that stays with you, because she feels like an invention, an injection of an idea and a rejection of the sphinx one. .... Kelly is much too recalcitrant or reverent of an actor to get at the root of Kennedy’s sexual appeal, his swagger, but at least he does look the part. The acting mandate was evidently to go puppy. There should be more grit in the story, which is too rhythmically indebted to the swoon beats of “Bridgerton.”

Bessette is played by Sarah Pidgeon, managing to do a lot with – script-wise – very little. Kennedy is played by Paul Anthony Kelly, a model in his first major role, who may get the idea eventually. .... Add to this two truly painful performances/vocal impressions – by Naomi Watts as Jackie Onassis, and Dree Hemingway as Hannah.

This is American history for fashion influencers. There isn’t much holding it together, but the looks are on point. .... Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain.