{"id":595516,"date":"2026-08-17T00:56:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T00:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/595516\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T00:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T00:56:13","slug":"love-story-producers-react-to-carolyn-bessettes-tiktok-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/595516\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Love Story\u2019 Producers React to Carolyn Bessette\u2019s TikTok Fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCatalog the ways in which Love Story<\/a>: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette could have gone wrong, and the tally might rival a Thanksgiving grocery list. Pressure on capturing the tragic couple and their time period was high enough before early test photos sent devotees of Bessette\u2019s style into a tizzy and a legion of paparazzi to the FX limited series\u2019 Manhattan shoot. But Love Story ultimately prevailed, commandeering online discourse for its nine-episode run and fetching seven Emmy nominations \u2014 including top limited series, one for lead actress Sarah Pidgeon and, shutting down any sartorial naysayers, outstanding period costumes. Power producing duo Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson know they could make things easier on themselves, but, like with their previous historic collaborations with Ryan Murphy, the fun is in trying to capture a feeling on camera that\u2019s no longer found in real life.<\/p>\n

\n\tEach true story brings a different minefield to navigate in terms of what\u2019s verifiable information, what\u2019s unknown and the varying public sentiments. Which needle was the most difficult to thread on Love Story?<\/p>\n

\n\tNINA JACOBSON It\u2019s about understanding both what was known about them and what was not known for so many people. Because, when we were growing up, they were like American royalty. They were icons. But with the subsequent generations, what we found is that people knew her so much better than they knew him. She had become a posthumous influencer. Yet, as much as people knew of her, it was only visual. It didn\u2019t really have anything to do with who she was as a person.<\/p>\n

\n\tBRAD SIMPSON There were lots of recordings of him. He\u2019d get tons of interviews. He was very public. We had to find her voice based on descriptions. And we just knew from all the research that, even though she presented as this WASP ideal and a sort of distant figure, she was incredibly warm and funny. Bringing that to life was one of our biggest challenges.<\/p>\n

\n\tWere you aware of how substantial the Carolyn fan accounts on Instagram and TikTok were?<\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON No, but we did know that she\u2019d become this avatar for quiet luxury. Often, when we would get costume designers presenting us styles for actresses in our movies and TV shows, she would appear again and again on wardrobe boards. And we did know that there was a lot on TikTok about her, but we didn\u2019t know how fevered it was when those early photos leaked and the world rained down saying it was going to be a disaster. It showed us the depth of the reach to people who weren\u2019t even alive when she was around.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think you\u2019ve been vindicated by a lot of the aesthetics. How did you capture \u201990s New York without going wildly over budget? <\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON New York has changed so much more than we\u2019d realized since the 1990s. It\u2019s much easier to shoot period in L.A. New York has huge glass skyscrapers everywhere. There are bike lanes in the streets. It was a city that always stayed the same, and now it looks very\u00a0different. Luckily, the places that were our main locations, Tribeca and the Upper East Side, had really stayed the\u00a0same.<\/p>\n

\n\tI recognized quite a few restaurants, too. <\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON We were lucky that some of the iconic restaurants that they visited \u2014 Indochine, The Odeon, Bubby\u2019s \u2014 are still there. We managed to shoot the last surviving restaurant of Sixth Street\u2019s India row [Panna II], which has now been swarmed with people. We were lucky in that some of those places just have that same great aesthetic, but [our production designer] Alex DiGerlando worked really hard with our locations department to find places that looked right and gave us a sense of New York during that time. On a show like The Shards, we\u2019re doing an interpretation of 1981. People wanted Love Story to evoke a well-photographed time.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom what I\u2019ve seen of The Shards, it looks very 1980s. Do you two ever do anything that\u2019s\u00a0just contemporary and\u00a0easy?<\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON Back on [The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story], we didn\u2019t understand. When we got into TV, we were naive. Our first script of O.J. had 110 scenes in it, and I remember the first visual production executive was like, \u201cThis is unshootable. There are no standing sets.\u201d You\u2019d think we would\u2019ve learned that lesson by now, which is to write to standing sets and not have so many scenes, but we tend to gravitate toward stories that are a little bit historical and feel cinematic.<\/p>\n

\n\tJACOBSON We came to television as feature producers. So, on the one hand, we\u2019ve learned along the way that a TV show is not just a long movie. There are some tricks to the trade. But at the same time, partly because we tend to alternate between books and historic stories, there\u2019s an ambition to try to capture a feeling. You can never make a book adaptation feel just like the book, but evoking the feeling you had when you read the book or the feeling you had about real people or time, that is our north star. We like having something to try to honor, preserve, capture, embody and get right as an organizing principle in a way that feels honest, even when you take the liberties you have to take in order to tell any story.<\/p>\n

\n\tLooking at each of the eight episodes of Love Story, which was the hardest one to pull off \u2014 either logistically or tonally? SIMPSON Everything\u2019s difficult. Even a show that doesn\u2019t work is difficult to pull off. (Laughs.) But one challenging one was episode eight, \u201cExit Strategy,\u201d which is just the two of them in a loft as their marriage is falling apart. Ryan had always had an idea to do a bottle episode to show the tensions in the marriage. But that episode proved to be a real challenge \u2014 in a great way because we were stripped of all the clothes and other characters. It had to move us through their relationship. The writers, Connor Hines and Juli Weiner, treated it as if it was a play. We rehearsed the actors on weekends and constantly rewrote. Logistically, the hardest episode to pull off was \u201cThe Wedding.\u201d We had to live up to the romance and re-create Georgia. And then, of course, the finale. There was the question of how much to show the plane crash, of how to be respectful while giving people the information they need and honoring what the characters went through.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been a few months now since the series aired. Has any feedback trickled to you from anyone surrounding the Kennedy camp?<\/p>\n

\n\tJACOBSON No, the Kennedys have not called recently. (Laughs.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON So much has been written about them. They\u2019ve been documented in so many ways. We fell in love with all these characters and wanted to be respectful and make something that was a tribute. As a family, it must be hard to live in a public life. It\u2019s part of what our show is about. But no, nothing has trickled back to us.<\/p>\n

\n\tLooking at a lot of your collaborations with Ryan \u2014 Crime Story, Sports Story and Love Story \u2014 how do you approach them at this point? How actively are you trying to identify stories that would fit in those franchises?<\/p>\n

\n\tJACOBSON We\u2019re always looking. We\u2019re like truffle pigs, constantly sniffing to find the next thing. What we tend to do is identify a few, put them into the works and wait for something to be good enough to be worth making. That doesn\u2019t always happen at the rate at which we would\u00a0like.<\/p>\n

\n\tSIMPSON I look at the way we produce as if we\u2019re curating our own magazine. I grew up with Tina Brown\u2019s Vanity Fair. I can imagine Crazy Rich Asians as an article about the rise of Chinese money and the culture of Singapore. You can imagine Pose as a feature about the trans ballroom scene. Every American Crime Story would obviously would fit in. I almost think of ourselves as editors, hoping stories come in well as journalists try to crack them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catalog the ways in which Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette could have gone wrong,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6971,321,12432,204898,93,61,60,54349],"class_list":["post-595516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-awards","tag-celebrities","tag-emmy-awards","tag-emmys-2026","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-love-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}