Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.”

On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.”

If JFK Jr. had a single physical flaw – I am grasping at straws here – it was a head slightly too large for his body

If JFK Jr. had a single physical flaw – I am grasping at straws here – it was a head slightly too large for his body

Which is, actually, the problem. The worshipful empathy lavished on its central characters makes Love Story banal and fundamentally false television, despite artful set-dressing that richly evokes the world of mid-1990s New York City. That the show is advertised as a modern-day Cinderella story presents an even bigger problem. In what version of the classic fairy tale does the prince, having plucked a young woman out of obscurity, then bring about her death – and her sister’s?

It’s not as if American audiences are averse to searing truths about the rich and glamorous. Succession, among the most successful TV dramas in recent years, presented a fictional family (stand-ins for the Murdochs) and, using a darkly comic, tragic tone, put an all-too-real spin on how it must feel to be them. Imagine if the makers of Love Story had attempted something similar. Instead, the Kennedys are depicted in counterfeit ways. Uncomfortable truths about young John – his recklessness, inattention and conceit – are glossed over, while his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (played ineptly by Naomi Watts), is smeared, depicted as a hectoring parent and a resentful, chain-smoking snob. In one gruesome scene, Onassis, a woman of remarkable poise and dignity, drunkenly dances to the score of the musical Camelot while swooning over a portrait of her late first husband, President John F. Kennedy.

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Why would Love Story creators give John Jr. a pass, flatten him into a kind of endearing everyman (with very expensive clothes) looking for true love in the big city?

Does it all start with one heartbreaking image? On November 25, 1963, his third birthday, at the........

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