How America’s most-watched TV show right now turned a Kennedy novice into a history nerd and why Indian shows rarely inspire this kind of curiosity
A still from Love Story, a new show about the romance and tragic deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette (below). PIC/GETTY IMAGES
There are certain pop culture stories that feel so large and omnipresent, that even if you don’t actively follow them, they somehow seep into your consciousness. For most people my age growing up in India, one such story was the saga of Princess Diana and the British royal family.
And yet there exists another dynasty, with an equally glamorous and tragic story — The Kennedys — that somehow slipped past my attention almost entirely until a new show brought them back on our social media feeds.
Who is John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr? Until very recently, he existed for me only as a vague silhouette — the son of an assassinated president, a handsome man from an impossibly famous family who used to date Sarah Jessica Parker, the lead of Sex and the City, in the ’90s.
Which is why watching
FX’s Love Story, produced by Ryan Murphy, felt strangely like discovering a pop culture universe I had somehow missed. And once I entered it, I found myself completely obsessed.
I started watching it because of actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Pidgeon has one of those faces made for the camera. Paired with Paul Anthony Kelly, who plays John, their chemistry is electric. When I saw stills of them from the show alongside real life photographs of John and Carolyn, I was hooked instantly.
Here is a show that has us sucked into the lives two people who passed away tragically in 1999. And while we all know how the story ends, it has not stopped us from rooting for their love. This, I realised, is what real pop culture obsession feels like — when a show doesn’t just entertain you for an hour but spills into the rest of your day.
In my case, it turned into a reading spiral that quickly led me to two books (and several documentaries): Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family. The show opened the door to the Kennedy myth, the curse on the family, JFK’s assassination, the interviews in George magazine, including Drew Barrymore’s Marilyn Monroe cover. My Instagram timeline is filled with nuggets of information about them and I am happy to lap it all up.
The person who truly pulled me in was not John. It was Carolyn.
Before the series, she was not someone I had consciously thought about. But now, I have probably read everything that exists about her on the Internet, including a slew of speculative hit pieces talking about her cocaine habits and abusive behaviour. The more you read about her, the less she feels like a person, and more like a puzzle.
Carolyn feels like such an aspirational rebel, a woman who knew her mind, who refused to let legacy occupy her identity, a woman relentlessly pursued by paparazzi. She wasn’t an actor or politician. She was, in many ways, a private person who suddenly found herself at the centre of one of the most scrutinised marriages in America. That tension, between her instinct for privacy and the world’s appetite for voyeurism, became her story.
Watching the show and reading about her life also made me realise that many compelling stories exist in the pages of history. The Kennedy family is a classic dynasty saga shaped by ambition, charisma, tragedy, and political power.
Understanding Carolyn means understanding the gravitational pull of that mythology. The witchhunt of Carolyn continues to be relevant today. That was Lady Diana’s story, that’s her story, and it continues to be the story of countless female celebrities across the world till date. And yet, for all the global fascination surrounding the Kennedys, it took a TV show in 2026 for me, a woman in India, to feel emotionally invested in the story. Which leads me to a question that has been nagging at me ever since I fell down this rabbit hole. Why is it so difficult to find an Indian story that produces this same level of obsession?
A single episode of Love Story can spark hours of conversation because a character made a choice that reveals their inner mind.
One morning, my friend and I chatted for an hour about Carolyn’s decision to leave Calvin Klein. She has this look of triumph which felt at odds with the independent woman Carolyn was shown as thus far. My friend felt it’s the smug look of being chosen by America’s sweetheart. I argued that it’s the victory of finally kicking the nest and coming into her own. The fact that two people in Mumbai could spend an hour debating the expression on the face of a woman who lived in 1990s New York says something about the power of solid storytelling.
Which brings me back to India.
There are countless stories here waiting to be told with that level of ambition and gusto. Our history is full of fascinating figures. We either reduce them to simplistic biopics or avoid them entirely in favour of fictional stories that feel oddly disconnected from our own lives. The result is a strange gap in the market.
There are millions of viewers, especially women, ready to fall in love with a story, particularly a sweeping romance. We’re just waiting for someone to give us a story worthy of frenzy. Watching this show made me realise I want television that makes me feel intellectually and emotionally invested in a world beyond the screen.
This is my request to Indian writers, creators, and producers: take a cue from America’s most watched show. Find the Indian story that will blow our mind. Perhaps one day someone will even attempt a dynasty saga of our own, though I suspect the Gandhi family’s life rights might already be spoken for. I promise you, your audience is waiting.
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