Our Enduring Fascination With the Kennedys

What It Covers

NYT culture writer Alexandra Jacobs joins host Rachel Abrams to analyze why Hulu's *Love Story* — a fictionalized account of JFK Junior and Carolyn Bessette's relationship — became Hulu's most-streamed limited series ever, logging 40 million viewing hours, and what the show reveals about nostalgia, fame, and American mythology.

Key Questions Answered

• •Cinderella formula: The show's core appeal rests on Carolyn Bessette being an unknown Calvin Klein publicist chosen by America's most eligible bachelor. Audiences project themselves onto her precisely because she wasn't famous. The implicit question — "why not me?" — is the same mechanism driving public fascination with Kate Middleton and Princess Diana narratives.
• •Mystery as cultural currency: Bessette gave almost no interviews during her lifetime, creating an information vacuum that Ryan Murphy's team filled with dramatic license. In an era of compulsory oversharing, her deliberate privacy reads as glamour. Unknowability becomes a form of power — the show's version of her is essentially a blank screen for audience projection.
• •Nineties nostalgia as escapism: The show romanticizes pre-iPhone Manhattan, when creative workers could afford to live there, careers in fashion and magazines felt viable, and daily life went undocumented. For digital natives who never experienced this, the era functions as an idealized alternative to algorithmic dating apps, AI job displacement, and constant surveillance.
• •Streisand Effect amplifies reach: Public criticism from JFK Junior's nephew Jack Schlossberg and actress Daryl Hannah — who wrote a widely-read New York Times op-ed claiming the show damaged her reputation and generated threatening messages — almost certainly increased viewership. Controversy converts passive observers into active participants who want to form their own opinions.
• •Kennedy longevity formula: The family's cultural staying power combines three elements: continuous participation in public life across generations (RFK Jr., Jack Schlossberg), association with a mythologized era of American promise, and Shakespearean tragedy. Each new media era — newspapers, television, tabloids, internet — produces a fresh Kennedy narrative cycle, with *Love Story* being the streaming iteration.