If it had happened to anyone else, it would sound like a heavy-handed production of a right-wing Cinderella: successful New York City girlboss who professes her hatred of commitment falls in love and quits her fashion job to marry the studly prince. The castle is a family compound in Hyannisport, and in lieu of glass slippers, our protagonist wears tiny black sunglasses. Playing the role of fairy godmother is Mr. Calvin Klein.
The tale taking Instagram feeds by storm is FX’s Love Story, which has catapulted itself to streaming records and the doomed romance of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy into the hearts of Gen Z women.
The latest in the American Story franchise, it’s a glossy retelling of a tumultuous courtship that played out across the tabloid covers of its time, but which is distant lore for a generation born after the pair’s infamous plane crash. Armed with that distance, producer Ryan Murphy invites Zoomers to project their preexisting case of 90s nostalgia onto the Kennedy couple. They’re more than happy to oblige; the pharmacy known for selling Bessette’s iconic headbands reported selling “six figures’ worth of hair accessories in February.”
Even without the Kennedy name or Bessette’s sartorial notoriety, a romance set in 1990s New York was guaranteed to be kryptonite for young people obsessed with the ante-internet world. Mary Julia Koch set the scene in the Wall Street Journal: “The series showcases a downtown New York scene filled with yellow taxi cabs, not Ubers. Young people smoke cigarettes—indoors!—and newsstands sell actual newspapers.”
In Love Story, Bessette and Kennedy’s relationship is peppered with interactions and miscommunications that would easily be resolved or replaced with a text today. When she refuses to disclose her phone number, he has to show up at her office to see her. He’s 20 minutes late to their first date, prompting her to scold that he should have called the restaurant. (Even their inside joke about being a “sucker for laminated menus” is a relic of its time — the same could never be said about scan-to-order QR codes!) When Carolyn won’t take his calls, John communicates by sending roses to her at work.
Like their romance, their social lives are low-tech. He plays pick-up football in Central Park (with no homeless drug addicts or mass Muslim prayer sessions in sight). She goes to the club with her friends. They’re constantly bumping into each other at parties. Even in the 90s, the lifestyles of a Calvin Klein executive and a president’s son would have been inaccessible to most, but wistful Gen Z audiences view them as inaccessible for different reasons.
Zoomers in New York now spend more than six hours on their phones per day, the New York Post reported last year. Americans aged 15-34 spend “roughly two more hours [at home] on a typical day in 2022 compared with 2003,” according to a New York Times analysis. A February study from the Institute for Family Studies found that 74 percent of women and 64 percent of men “reported they had not dated or dated only a few times in the last year,” despite many of those surveyed wanting to do so.
Unlike Murphy’s CBK, most women can’t rely on Calvin Klein to swoop in and introduce them to America’s prince. Instead, they have Date Drop, a matchmaking service that has grown from the brainchild of a Stanford grad student to a $2 million venture and earned a feature in the Wall Street Journal.
Students fill out a survey and are matched with a classmate by an algorithm. Stanford student Alena Zhang described the problem that Date Drop aims to resolve: “People just struggle with striking conversations in general — let alone romantic interactions.”
Against that bleak diagnosis, it’s no wonder we’re captivated by the lively charm of Bessette and Kennedy’s New York, or at least by Murphy’s version of it. Their real-life relationship, memorialized in a physical, public fight by paparazzi cameras, may be less suited for imitation; my old colleague Emily Jashinsky has a fascinating chat about that with Maureen Callahan here.
If the one-line descriptions of the remaining episodes are any indication, the show does plan to dive deeper into the couple’s turmoils. As with most celebrity couples, there’s plenty not to emulate.
But beneath the Kangol hats and headbands, Zoomers are homesick for an analog world where a lack of online convenience created an incentive for effort. Love Story reminds us of the world our parents told us about: where coworkers match-made you with their friends, guys played football on sunny afternoons and sent girls bouquets of roses, and your date walked you home instead of calling an Uber. Those habits, more than these outfits, are worth bringing back.
The first seven episodes of Love Story are available to stream on Hulu. Two final episodes are scheduled to release on March 20 and 27.
