On his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the Democratic governor of California has made it a goal to rigorously engage with the opposition. But he is acceding, appeasing, as he nods and “mm-hmm”s in response to guests such as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro, ideologues who come on the show to discuss the machinations of MAGA. And so the podcast’s producers, perhaps intuiting that the dialogue experiment with conservatives is failing, occasionally slot in friendlier agents of power, Hollywood types, with whom Newsom can discuss the finer points of things like tax incentives to film in the state of California.

Last summer, Newsom interviewed the television producer and showrunner Ryan Murphy, a beneficiary of the California Film Commission’s tax-credit program. Showrunner is a scant identifier for Murphy, who, next to Taylor Sheridan and possibly Tyler Perry, cuts, rather, the figure of a streaming imperialist, endlessly iterating formulaic soaps about gender and power in the country. On the podcast, Newsom asked Murphy about the upcoming entrant in his “Love Story” anthology series—there are also the “American Crime Story” and “American Horror Stories” series—which would detail the relationship of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette, America’s son and his bride, who died in a plane crash just off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, in 1999. The two were cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Atlantic, an unreachable grave site, which intensified the irrational feeling that the couple had disappeared on some journey—where to, we don’t know.

At one point during the interview, Newsom brings up Jack Schlossberg, the thirty-three-year-old son of Caroline Kennedy, J.F.K., Jr.,’s sister. Murphy can barely conceal his resentment of what he perceives as a sort of aristocratic entitlement. The public found the adult Schlossberg during the pandemic years, seizing on his Instagram, where he proved himself to be completely literate in the language of internet absurdism. His wise-clown personality came as a shock, in part because of the legion of mythologized men he resembled. He skewered the veneration of his own family, too, later asking his followers on X whether Usha Vance, the Second Lady, was “hotter” than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his grandmother. The line crossed, the kid cowed, he was now getting more serious, acting like the scion in the headlines. (He is now running for Congress in New York.) After “Love Story” was announced, Schlossberg accused Murphy of profiting off his family’s tragedy “in a grotesque way.” Murphy’s response, on Newsom’s podcast, was amazingly mean. He thought it was an “odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember.” Afterward, Schlossberg exploded, citing childhood memories of his uncle—the given nickname of Jackolantern; his uncle driving a Pontiac convertible and picking him up from school.

Ownership of the Kennedy story is a war with many combatants. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, Jacqueline, alert with a widow’s sense of history management, spun in Life magazine the myth of Camelot. The tabloids go occult, explaining death after death through the logic of the Kennedy curse. The family’s confidants, real and imagined, insist on both their normalcy and their otherworldly grace. The gossips leak letters indicating the family’s ruthlessness. The aesthetes (the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, the director Pablo Larraín) expel the Kennedy men from consideration, focussing instead on Jackie, with her scarlet letter “O.” Of the hagiographers, the dozens of them, the story is Greek tragedy, the hero fated to doom, a narrative lifted from Robert F. Kennedy himself, famous reciter of Aeschylus in grief at the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., just two months before his own assassination. The critical biographers, perhaps none as trenchantly as Garry Wills, the author of “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” published in 1982, remind us that, as Attorney General during his brother’s Administration, Robert Kennedy gave the green light for J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap King’s phones. The credo of politics without values that was forged: the Wills strain of psychoanalytic history, beginning with a deep reading of Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch, an Irish Catholic who makes a fortune pooling stocks and then works out his reprisal against the Boston Brahmin class that rejected him through his relentless elevation of his sons—this is not the story that sticks.

The book cited as the source for Murphy’s new series—Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy”—was published in 2024. What’s the reason for this one? In the scrum of literature about the Kennedys and their satellites, the wives, saddled with the heavy work of making the family grow, Beller’s book is guileless. Its premise is that Bessette, an outsider in the family, deserves for her reputation to be reclaimed. It’s a corrective spree: she was not a Wasp from Greenwich; she and her two sisters were raised Catholic by their single mother, an Italian American, in White Plains. The move to Connecticut came later, and Bessette also worked throughout her teen-age years. According to Beller, Bessette’s relationship with J.F.K., Jr.—which was often depicted in the press as tumultuous, with the tabloids marking Bessette as a vixen, an opportunist, a bitch—had its ordinary stresses magnified by the swarm of paparazzi around the couple, a form of stalking that destroyed Bessette’s mental health. Nearly every source—the schoolteacher, the childhood classmate, the colleague at Calvin Klein, where she eventually worked—praises Bessette as unnaturally gorgeous, socially canny, quick-witted, generous, compassionate, etc. Hounded by the tabloids in New York City, hazed by the Kennedys at the compound in Hyannis, she was in agony at the end of her life, Beller posits, having relinquished her agency to meet the burden of being loved by John and the hellish public scrutiny that came with his affection. In sum, the Beller biography gives Bessette the familiar Princess Diana interpretive treatment.

Schlossberg was not by any means alone in shading the Murphy show while it was in production. C.B.K., as she is called, is the love object of a posthumous legion of admirers. They are more than admirers, though. They are custodians of the myth. Bessette refused the profile at Vogue or Harper’s; the custodians do not have a lot of material to work with. But they’ve done plenty of work anyway, and what makes Beller’s book seem belated—gratuitous—is the already well-established, loosely connected school of bloggers, mimics, and lay analysts of Bessette’s public footprint, namely her minimalist nineties style. Their Bessette is a creature of photography. Even in the famous paparazzi shots of Bessette and J.F.K., Jr., squabbling in Washington Square Park, they see an opportunity for aesthetic analysis. The scan of the proportion of the camel-colored pencil skirt, the break on the bootleg jean, the wear on the spazzolato bag—these have all become points for divining the intelligence and savvy of Bessette. Most anachronistically, some recruit Bessette as an avatar for so-called quiet luxury and clean-girl aesthetics, recent trends that are expressions not of individual personality but of discernment and discipline turned menacingly inward. And so the custodians became irate when photographs emerged of the actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette in Murphy’s show, looking all wrong on set. The chief affront was the hair: too yellow, far from C.B.K.’s ice-blond. The critiques were heard, Murphy told Newsom; Pidgeon, a brunette then wearing a wig, was ultimately forced to bleach. “Bessette is loved as a mute,” a friend summarized to me over drinks, the other night.

The show had its première party in New York City in early February. The Times’ Styles section did its glossy treatment of the night, which struck a familiar tone. The wish in a certain class of creative professionals today is to resuscitate the shift in the atmosphere of the nineties, that clash of the louche and the classed, the first gentrifications of downtown—impossible in the fully corporatized Manhattan of today. This cohort has too much money, too many brand sponsorships—this cohort has Instagram. Pidgeon and her John, the actor Paul Anthony Kelly, dressed respectively in the slip and in the suit, were styled to look like dolls of the real couple. The party was held at the Pool, the seafood den in midtown, where prop copies of George, the pop-culture-meets-politics magazine started by J.F.K., Jr., were fanned out on glass tables. George is currently extant in a horrific form; the trademark having been bought by a conspiracy-theorist lawyer some years ago. But that, and the degradation it represents, was allowed no oxygen in that chrome room.

Eight of the nine episodes of “Love Story” were made available for review. How Murphy and Connor Hines, the creator, handle the tragedy of the plane crash, an accident sometimes narrativized as more than the result of thick fog but the culmination of an inherited arrogance, remains to be seen. They will have to strain for good taste there. Otherwise, the tone of the show is pure cosmopolitan sympathy. So much of “Love Story” is forgettable, because the Wikipedia-page-like narrowness on the doomed romance excises all that contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking J.F.K. as a forefather, Ted Kennedy, the brother of J.F.K. and R.F.K., recovering from the scandal of Chappaquiddick and the humiliation of a failed Presidential run to become the “lion” of the Senate—that makes the Kennedy story, one of a relationship to a greater culture, so compelling. One can’t subsist on the restaging of fights in the park alone! 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. Hines and Pidgeon give the woman a choreography, the dramatic toss of the hair, the hips gone concave, the Marlboro rasp in her voice. When we lose her verve, in later episodes, we feel more viscerally the first tragedy, which was how her marriage wrecked her life.

The show, a sort of elegy for Gen X, opens with a flash-forward to July 16, 1999, the final hours of Carolyn and John. On the tarmac, the lovers crouch, pressing their foreheads together, as if knowledgeable about their impending end. The early episodes are mostly devoted to filling out Bessette’s downtown existence, her professional and social world at Calvin Klein, where she is a star in the universe of the designer, who is played with spice by Alessandro Nivola. The show is a self-conscious fashion story; it gives off that defensive and wounded self-importance of some fashion people, their craft relegated on some psychological level to service work, in comparison to the arts or politics. You don’t need to understand that a siege was under way then, that Klein and Donna Karan and other provocative Americans were poised to go “uptown” to bring sex and skin to Madison Avenue, overtaking the old-money élites. Carolyn is a working girl with a budget. Before she meets John, she has a boy toy, Michael Bergin (who in real life wrote a dishy book about their “situationship,” to use the modern parlance). She is a picture of East Village resourcefulness. She lives in a world of images, of fashion, which certainly comes with its own set of politics.

Paul Anthony Kelly’s John, when we meet him, has his Bouvier bouffant stuffed under backward Kangols and baseball caps, riding his bike around Tribeca as if it were a steed. 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.” The show invents the initial meeting to be like Cinderella crashing the ball. Carolyn sneaks into a gala; Klein, the fairy godmother, introduces her to the instantly besotted prince, John. In the annals, Kennedy and Bessette met at the Calvin Klein offices—her turf, not his—a scene that Hines recreates soon after as a domination ritual, Carolyn with pen in mouth, taking John’s measurements, as he poses in amused ecstasy. He thinks he knows his waist size—thirty-three. She corrects him. What else doesn’t he know about himself? Is there a self to know?

The political dynasty is not guaranteed a future. The fitness of the second and third generations is threatened by the very privilege they are born into. The unknowable father looms over John. The mother, meanwhile, is dying quietly in the penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue. (Naomi Watts was fun as the socialite Babe Paley in another Murphy property. Here, as Jackie O., she is a camp disaster.) Grace Gummer plays Caroline, J.F.K., Jr.,’s burdened sister, a sort of embodied critique of Kennedy playboy masculinity. Her brother is teetering on becoming a failson. When he can’t pass the bar exam, the New York Daily News relishes in wordplay—“The Hunk Flunks.”

The John of this show is like a love junkie; he needs women to fuel his pursuits, such as George. “Love Story” slavishly wants to get the interpretation “right” in painting the family not as a patriarchy but as an institution in which the women ruled, to set up the intrusion of Carolyn. In one of the few scenes to express any curiosity about Kennedy liberalism, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert, orchestrates a dinner-table game in Hyannis in which the youngest generation must give their “thoughts” on the trade embargo with Cuba. Politicking as a nasty parlor game is Carolyn’s introduction to the Kennedys.

Things have to happen for the couple to happen. The show is good at making the off-and-on vicissitudes of modern dating feel natural to the plot. The mother has to die. The pair has to dump their former lovers. Dree Hemingway (yes, that Hemingway) plays poor Daryl Hannah, whom J.F.K., Jr., was dating when he met Bessette, like she is a ghost, the representative “blonde” and “actress” for whom three generations of Kennedys demonstrated a ravenous appetite—Gloria Swanson and Marilyn Monroe coming before her. The actresses, almost like a gender, in the Kennedy story, know, to some degree, what kind of public attention to expect. The tension in Hines’s version lies in Bessette’s refusal to conform to the role. Kelly’s emotional two-dimensionality increases our anger on behalf of Pidgeon’s Carolyn, a vibrant professional woman who sees her life and her career toxified by the paparazzi and the press. She is trying to shake her man awake to the danger. There is a part of John that likes the attention. But he is alarmed to see Carolyn losing her spark, after they marry, their Tribeca loft becoming her tomb. Even so, he never truly considers leaving his cage.

So the eighth episode overdoes the whole “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” thing. It is August of 1997. Diana of Wales dies. In the compressed timeline of the show, her death has a foreboding placement, as if on the eve of the crash near the Cape. Carolyn is glued to the television, immediately identifying with the princess in the Mercedes-Benz; John can’t take her obsessing. The relationship is crumbling. He goes out for a run and returns. The two erupt in argument, in misunderstanding, with John confessing his anger at his lot. He’s no Prince Harry or William; his whole life has been colored by the threat of murder, accident, illness, assassination. The episode ends. And then the tale moves toward its ordained ending. ♦