Love Story came to an end with an emotional and explosive season finale — but how did the show address John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette‘s deaths after a fatal plane crash?
The finale, which aired on Thursday, March 26, showed Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) and John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Kelly) in the plane with her sister , Lauren (Sydney Lemmon), on their way to Martha’s Vineyard when he started to panic behind the wheel. The last shot of the accident showed Carolyn trying to calm JFK Jr. down as the trio came to terms with the grave situation.
FX didn’t show the actual moment that Carolyn, JFK Jr. and Lauren died. Instead, their loved ones started to receive word of their disappearance at the episode’s halfway mark. The grieving process — and how the families came together to mourn — was the focus of the second half of the finale. In the final scene, Carolyn and Lauren’s mom read a eulogy before the shot changed to JFK Jr. and Carolyn happily looking out at the waves while on the beach together.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette was the first installment in Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series and was inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
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Despite pulling from real events, the writing team largely didn’t consult with the subjects portrayed on the show.
“We haven’t yet, and we hope that people appreciate their portrayals,” executive producer Brad Simpson exclusively told Us Weekly during a joint interview with Nina Jacobson in February. “Every actor approached [their role] with love.”
“You reach out to one person, and then it becomes, ‘Why are you not reaching out to every person?’ We love these characters. We did deep, deep research. It’s based on not just the Elizabeth Beller book but many other artifacts from that time and many other histories,” Simpson explained to Us. “We came from a place of love, but if you foreground one person’s personal story and their version of the truth, then you have to foreground everybody’s, and often they’re in conflict. On all our shows we tried to be true to what we think the characters were and show you what it was like to walk in their footsteps.”
After meeting in 1992, Carolyn and JFK Jr. were on and off for years before getting married. Their relationship was thrust into the spotlight with highs and lows often making headlines. They both died in a plane crash in 1999.
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“We had Elizabeth Beller’s book for reference, but we did face challenges [capturing certain moments]. They died so young, but we had enough information from people around them to know what the problems were in their marriage, what the tensions were, what the highs were, what the lows were,” Simpson told Us. “People don’t have an idea of what her voice was like because we only have a tiny clip of her voice, but they have a very distinct idea of what her image was like. So we had to get the walk down and the look and the allure. But Sarah could really interpret and go with it. John, we have a lot of recordings of him, and we have a lot more on him.”
Looking ahead, Simpson and Jacobson were hopeful that viewers would recognize the care that went into the show.
“We loved these characters. We fell in love with them, and it is essential that the audience loved them too. So we knew that we came to it from a very honest and earnest place — and that the show was never meant to dunk on either one of them in any way,” Jacobson explained. “We knew from the beginning that we were coming in with love and respect for these characters and that we wanted the audience to share that with us.”
Love Story is streaming on Hulu now.
