A new product from the Ryan Murphy brand is becoming ever less dependable a delight. Will it be a Nip/Tuck or Glee-level triumph? A return to inaugural American Horror Story form, as his recent outing The Beauty so nearly was? Or will it be something towards the other end of the scale, where the so-bad-it’s-bad, Kim-Kardashian-as-a-divorce-lawyer All’s Fair lurks?

Hmm. The latest one is Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. It is a nine-episode series that lasts roughly as long as the golden couple’s relationship did in real life and is (unlike All’s Fair) punishingly boring. Some of this will be due to the fact that for a UK audience the Kennedys simply do not hold the fascination they have always held for Americans. Ever since the patriarch Joe successfully manoeuvred his telegenic son John F Kennedy into politics, the political dynasty have been the United States’ answer to the royal family. The minutiae of their privileged, cursed lives have been breathlessly chronicled in books by hagiographic biographers, tabloid articles seeking scandal, and everything in between. Over here, of course, we have naturally been less enthralled.

So much less so that it is, perhaps, necessary to clarify at this point that, yes, John F Kennedy Jr is JFK’s son (little John-John, who came most heartbreakingly to public attention on his third birthday, as he saluted the coffin of his assassinated father as the funeral procession passed him). And Carolyn Bessette was, briefly, his wife. They started dating in 1994, married in 1996 and died in 1999, along with her sister Lauren, when the light aircraft John was piloting crashed into the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Bessette is played by Sarah Pidgeon, managing to do a lot with – script-wise – very little. Kennedy is played by Paul Anthony Kelly, a model in his first major role, who may get the idea eventually.

‘A media obsession from the moment they started’ … Kelly and Pidgeon in Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Photograph: Copyright 2025, FX. All rights reserved.

You can see why the story (inspired by the book Once Upon a Time, created by Connor Hines, executive produced by Ryan M) was bound to be fed into the Murphy machine. There is class warfare, since John Jr was a god and Bessette was a feisty girl from the wrong side of the tracks (at least from the Kennedys’ point of view, but then who wasn’t?). There is celebrity culture – the pair were a media obsession from the moment they started dating (after their eyes met across a crowded Amazon fundraiser), especially as it was in the wake of John’s five-year, on-off relationship with Darryl Hannah. And there is glamour – the effortlessly elegant Bessette worked for Calvin Klein and became known as an impeccably stylish dresser and tastemaker, while John, of course, trailed clouds of glory everywhere he went as well as being a tremendously handsome and charismatic figure in whatever could be said to be his own right.

Their relationship was complicated by the pressures of fame, endless paparazzi intrusion on their privacy and, allegedly, Bessette’s drug use and unwillingness to start a family. It should be enough to sustain a miniseries, but what emerges on screen is an endless, drab slog charting what feels like every moment, no matter how narratively pointless, of the couple’s pre-relationship situations, courtship and marriage. Up close and shorn of any of Murphy’s trademark razzle-dazzle, these are rendered as dull to watch as it is to hear about any couple you’ve never met and couldn’t care less about. There is an extended sequence of Bessette sending back different bouquets of red roses from John-John after newspaper reports that he is back with Hannah, which will send you cross-eyed with boredom, lines that make you want to throw yourself into a canal (“She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met”, “I have worked too hard to watch you be sucked into this pervasive narrative of entitlement and recklessness that has plagued every member of this family”) and take the poor actors required to deliver them with you. Swim! Swim fast and swim far! And then swim further, because “Between your lineage and your heritage you’re like the poster child for emotional avoidance” is coming up behind you.

Add to this two truly painful performances/vocal impressions – by Naomi Watts as Jackie Onassis, and Dree Hemingway as Hannah (who, unless she actually is the sub-moronic wraith she is depicted as here, should sue) – and this is not a nine-hour story anyone could love, at least in this country. But we are a bagatelle to the Murphy market, so I’m sure there will be no slowdown in production or quality checks introduced at the factory. Brace yourselves.

Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette is on Disney+ from 13 February