‘Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette’ Mid-Season Report Card: Students Show Excellent Promise & Are Putting In The Work

'Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette' Season 1, Episode 5 Review: Battery Parka

Overall Grade: A-

Teachers Notes: Leads are putting in the work and show excellent promise without taking any AP courses. Can sell us ocean front property in Arizona. Ethel Kennedy scares us and Daryl – well she’s done dirty.

It’s that time. Midterms have taken place and we’re sitting back and looking at Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. There is a lot of love and hate for the show – depending on if you thought it should or shouldn’t be made. Though I can understand both sides of the conversation, I do have to admit that I am glad that I sat down to watch this show.

The reasons that I decided to watch this show was for one reason – I grew up on these two. John F. Kennedy Jr and Caroline Bessette were royalty. They captivated the world with everything that they did. They were American royalty.

We’re 2/3’s of the way through the series and I have to admit that I will be sad for it to end. There has been something special about this series and I do believe that it has something to do with the casting of the show.

The writing also.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette has been a master class in what others should do when making a show that depicts a love story for people who were alive, and who the world is fascinated with.

John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette are timeless. They always will be.

WHAT’S WORKING

Grade: A

The casting. Now, I have been around long enough to know that casting is one of the most important parts of any production. The actors – I believe – are even more important than the scripts. Scripts can be horrible, but if you have a good cast then they can make the words sound better.

Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly are what makes this limited series appointment television. The two embody John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette to the point where you can be convinced that they have become the characters on the screen.

It’s the chemistry that these two share on the screen and in interviews that captivates the viewer and draws them in. At least that has been the conversation between me and my friends.

The other thing that has been working is the way that they’ve made New York a main character and as if it is the New York of the 90’s even though it has drastically changed. It feels as though we’re traveling through time and that feels really welcoming.

FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette — Pictured: (l-r) Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. CR: Kurt Iswarienko/FX

WHAT’S NOT WORKING

Grade: C+

Sometimes it has been hard to follow the timeline that has been set forth in the show. Have no idea of how much time has passed between certain things and that is very frustrating. It feels like a month has passed and I know that it has been much longer than that.

Confusion with timelines take me out of a story because I spend a lot of time wondering how long its been and also questioning how people fall in love or out of love so fast.

BEST EPISODE

Grade: A-

Battery Park has hands down been the best episode thus far. Yes, some would say that it was The Wedding, but it’s how late people were for the wedding that gave me anxiety. A lot of anxiety.

I think that Battery Park was so good because – even though none of us really know what their infamous fight was about – the way that it was written and brought to life that had me on the edge of my seat. They convinced me that the fight that they had on the screen could have been the fight that John and Carolyn actually had.

Even more so it was the emotional roller coaster that I was on while watch the show. I was screaming at the television and then I found myself crying too. There was a lot of emotions that I circled through and that was something that not all television shows can make me do.

But this episode did.

I’ve watched it a few times, because it was just that good.

BALANCE AND BERGIN

Our Grade: B+

I have read a lot of books on John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. There are a lot of things that I do take with a grain of salt. I’ve said it before and will say it again – no one really knows what happened except John and Carolyn.

I asked, “But because of all of the things that are said about the relationship between Bessette and Bergin, I wondered how there was a lot of conversation about what is real and what is dramatized. I know that a lot of this is a dramatization, but how did they find the balance when there’s a difference of conversation about how it was in real life when you’re portraying people who are real, but you’re portraying them in a not-real way?”

The insane amount of books about the Kennedy’s is part of what makes me wonder what is real and what isn’t. I felt like it was a fair question to ask. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette isn’t a documentary, so asking about the balancing what is known and what is made up is fair.

For instance in Michael Bergin’s book, he claims that his relationship with Bessette continued even after she was married. Though we don’t know what is true or not, we wanted to know what to think.

Brad said, “Elizabeth’s book was our real way in. It was our guide. She had done a thoroughly reported book that was written more recently. I think that on all of these shows that we do, where it’s People Versus OJ or other things, we read all the books that the characters have written, but usually we go with the journalist’s books, who’s reporting it as opposed to the first-person narrative. On OJ, everybody wrote a book, and they all had their own version of the story. I don’t want to take anything away from Michael Bergin.”

He continued, “They had a real relationship, but the Carolyn that we wanted to portray was the Carolyn that existed in Elizabeth’s thoroughly reported book. As we all know, there are many facets to us in our lives, and many people you come in contact with, and we wanted to give a fair shake to everybody and know what it was like to walk in their shoes. When it came down to it, we really used Elizabeth’s book as the guide because it is the most recent book that is a real history of the couple, where she interviewed multiple people and looked at all the memoirs and all the articles about them.”

And finished off answering with, “We really wanted to focus on the love story between John and Carolyn, too. Obviously, in the 365 days of our year and the breadth of our lives, so many things happen. We really wanted to stay narrowly focused on what it was like for them to fall in love, the challenges they faced, what almost brought them apart, what was bringing them back together at the end, and what was lost when we lost them.”

WHO HATES DARYL?

Our Grade: D-

Watching this show I have to wonder, who hates Daryl Hannah? I am not even making jokes here. Being completely honest when I say that her portrayal is as if she’s got the mind of a child and is a narcassist, as well as pure crazy.

I asked producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Price who hated her – because of the way that she is in the show.

Nina said, “We don’t hate her. We don’t. She is the girl who wants the boy who our heroine also wants. That just puts her right there at a disadvantage because, of course, we want him to end up with Carolyn and not with Daryl because we’re invested in this romance. She has the misfortune of being the person who stands in the way of our romance.”

Brad added, “I’m not going to disagree with people’s read on it, but I know Dree Hemingway approached it from a real place of love for Daryl. John is the one who takes her back in. I actually think that the things that Daryl says to him in the show are really pointed and show an awareness that John himself did not have at the time. She’s saying to him, “You think that just any woman can step into the spotlight and being your fiancee and your wife, you’re wrong. You’re deluded.”

“I think that fight that they have is really true in terms of it’s a real foreshadowing of what Carolyn is going to go through. I think that she, in some ways, is correct that John doesn’t understand what it takes because he’s always gotten a pass from the press. They never wrote anything bad about him. I think that in a lot of ways, we’re meeting them towards the end of a really long relationship, so nobody comes off well. I think John doesn’t come off great in those scenes, sitting there, Wes’s mom doesn’t show up for dinner.” he added, “I’m not going to argue against people’s interpretation, but I think we’re meeting them at the end of a really long relationship that’s not working out. Daryl has some really valid points that, in many ways, the things that she says are going to be tough for any future girlfriend turn out to be true as you watch the episodes.”

Though I do understand exactly what they are saying, I (and several people on the internet) thought that she was just hated by the writers or someone in production because of how she was portrayed. Just pure delusional.