In these troubled times, who isn’t loving the nostalgia of the Kennedys and Love Story’s 90s New York? | Emma Brockes

IIf you’re looking for a break from the clouds of this terrible news cycle, may I direct you to Love Story, the nine-part executive-produced – but more importantly, unwritten! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely death of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You may think it’s not for you, that it’ll be too tabloid, 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’s exactly the show we need.

This probably seems like a heartless summary of a true story that ends with the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while transporting his wife and sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light plane, killing everyone on board). But this tragic ending only imbues the preceding nine hours of story with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just enough to make the iron gray wash of today’s reality disappear. The New York of the love story is not the current iteration of the city, with its impossible rents and unattractive financial bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the New York of the 1990s, say Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump runs through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster.

Instead, Love Story takes place in Kate Moss’s stylized New York, freshly discovered at Calvin Klein; it’s lunch at the Four Seasons and dinner at Indochine. There’s an excellent Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, standing in the street using one of those half-closed payphones, and Sarah Pidgeon, excellent as Bessette, blowing smoke through the three-inch crack in a window. Before this show, I had absolutely no nostalgia for smoking in offices or anywhere else. Now apparently scenes of people blowing smoke indoors make me sigh in sadness. (Same goes for wearing capri pants and black loafers.)

I was also not aware of being nostalgic for the Kennedy dynasty. But there’s something oddly poignant about looking back at a time when the worst thing a Kennedy did was wear his baker’s cap backwards and fail his New York bar exam — rather than, say, scooping up vitamins as a treatment for measles during a surge of cases in the United States.

This sense of confusion is part of the broader revival of ’90s nostalgia driven by Gen Z yearning for what feels, to them, like a simpler time, before the Internet, where people managed to meet without sending 500 texts documenting every step of their journey, and where one could anchor themselves in the tangible pleasures of vinyl records. 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 took an in-depth look at the show’s costumes, which, after paparazzi shots of poorly dressed and cheaply-dressed actors were widely shared and mocked early in the series’ filming, ended up being purchased via eBay, Etsy and an appeal to fashion collectors. Real estate websites have worked hard on the production design, while the soundtrack – featuring the likes of Lenny Kravitz, En Vogue and Björk – remains on-trend. When, in episode four, Madonna’s 1994 anthem, Secret, begins to play, you might cry for more innocent moments.

Another key to its charm: Love Story understands the sensibilities of those who are most likely to like it and gives us exactly what we need. Namely, Naomi Watts, aged to play Jackie O in her final days, landing a performance somewhere between Edie Beale and Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose. In one scene, Watts, cigarette in hand, gently sways to the rhythm of Richard Burton’s finale of the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot while looking 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 to the left, via a hearse, to the sound of Hail Mary.

Of course, not everyone likes it. Jack Schlossberg, nephew of JFK Jr. and last claimant to JFK’s 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 has never met anyone in my family and doesn’t know anything about us, talk to Ryan Murphy. » We absolutely sympathize. Shows like Love Story are monstrously presumptuous and unforgivably flippant. And yet, give it one episode and I defy you not to pass out and keep watching.

• Emma Brockes is a columnist at the Guardian

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