When the nominations for the 2026 Emmy Awards were announced, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette managed only three nominations in the major categories: best miniseries, best lead actress for Sarah Pidgeon, and best supporting actress for Constance Zimmer.
An important recognition, yes, but it seems insufficient when looking at everything the series has achieved since its premiere. Because the Love Story phenomenon goes far beyond the series: it has managed to make Carolyn Bessette come back into the spotlight.
The absence of Paul Anthony Kelly
If there is one absence that draws particular attention, it is Paul Anthony Kelly, who was in charge of portraying John F. Kennedy Jr. It seems strange that Sarah Pidgeon did manage a nomination for her role as Carolyn Bessette and that Kelly was left out, considering that a large part of the series works precisely thanks to the chemistry between the two.
Kelly, who until now was virtually unknown to the general audience, manages to construct a John F. Kennedy Jr. who moves away from the idealized image we have of him. His character is charismatic and outwardly confident, but also insecure, impulsive and weighed down by the burden of his surname. That more vulnerable aspect is what makes the relationship with Carolyn believable and prevents the series from turning into a succession of pretty 1990s photographs.
Nominations also miss other performances from the cast, especially Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Grace Gummer as Caroline Kennedy, John’s sister. Watts manages to move away from the image we have of Jackie as an icon and show her in a much more vulnerable phase of her life, while Gummer delivers a particularly solid performance as Caroline, a woman who knows better than anyone the weight of belonging to the Kennedy family and who tries to protect her brother from decisions that could complicate his life even further.
Photo from the series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette
And that is precisely one of the greatest challenges of Love Story. Even before watching the series, we already knew how the story ended: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married in 1996 and died three years later in a plane crash. Their relationship was one of the most photographed of the era and, since then, has been told and analyzed countless times.
The series, however, does not need to play with mystery. The interesting thing is everything that happens before. How they meet, how their relationship begins, what it means for Carolyn to join a family like the Kennedys, and how fame ends up affecting a couple trying to maintain some privacy. It achieves something quite tricky: to make us care about a story whose ending we know from the very first episode.
Carolyn Bessette is back in style
But if there is one consequence of Love Story that is particularly evident, it is off-screen. It has managed to make Carolyn Bessette once again a reference in aesthetics. Her style was already a regular source of fashion inspiration, but the series has once again sparked interest in her wardrobe and in the minimalist 1990s it represented. Long coats, white shirts, black dresses, straight-leg jeans, loafers, sunglasses, and headbands have reappeared on social networks and in the proposals of brands and stylists.
Clothing is, moreover, one of the best tools the series uses to construct Carolyn. The wardrobe is not limited to recreating the nineties or reproducing Bessette’s most famous looks. It serves to show how her life changes and how her relationship with public exposure changes as well. The wardrobe team drew on archives, vintage stores, and original garments to get as close as possible to the clothes the couple wore. And the result has something especially interesting: it makes many of those looks feel current, not costumes from a past era.
Photo from the series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette
Another key to the success of Love Story lies in the recreation work. The series starts from a story for which there is archival material: photographs, videos, public appearances, and moments that form part of the collective imagination. That makes any minor error much more evident. Here it is not enough for an actor to resemble the character: they have to make a scene that we have all seen in photographs look real again.
The series pays close attention to those details. From clothing and hairstyles to settings, gestures, and the way John and Carolyn related themselves in front of the cameras. There are moments when the images of the fiction could easily be mistaken for the original photographs, precisely because the recreation does not seek to make a literal copy, but to reproduce the atmosphere of that era.
And there too the photography of the series has a lot to do with it. The aesthetics are carefully crafted to recall the images of the nineties without turning each shot into a vintage postcard. The aim is for us to feel that we are watching John and Carolyn before knowing that they would end up becoming one of the decade’s most famous couples.
One of the shows of the year
That said, if there is one thing that is undeniable, it is how deserved the nominations for Sarah Pidgeon and Constance Zimmer are. Pidgeon delivers an exceptional Carolyn Bessette, far beyond the style icon we know from the photographs, and Zimmer is equally brilliant in her role, delivering one of the series’ most solid performances.
So, if you’re among the few people who still haven’t seen Love Story, perhaps now is the moment. Because beyond the Emmys, beyond Carolyn Bessette and all the looks that have come back into fashion, it is one of those series you can’t help but watch and that manages to make you forget everything else during the 45 minutes each episode lasts, even though you know very well how it ends.
