Old-school romance to inspired needle drops: Eight reasons why Love Story became 2026's first TV phenomenon

No show has sparked more conversation this year than Ryan Murphy's miniseries about '90s golden couple John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette and their doomed relationship. Here's why.

Of all the TV shows most eagerly anticipated for 2026, a soapy, fictionalised retelling of a high-profile, thirty-year-old relationship seemed, at first glance, unlikely to make massive waves.

But that was severely underestimating the power of Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, the latest series from super-producer Ryan Murphy, and its account of the '90s golden couple's romance, marriage and troubles with fame, until their tragic deaths in a plane crash in 1999. 

Since its February launch, just ahead of Valentine's Day, it has returned the pair to the headlines once again and become the year's first appointment TV. The nine-episode season concludes tomorrow, and as well as breaking streaming records, it feels like a genuine cultural phenomenon across different demographics. "It's rare for my friends, my mum and my husband to all want to watch the same show, but they're all watching Love Story," says Jillian Bonanne, host of TV podcast Previously On. 

So why has the series captured the imaginations of viewers so intensely?

1. The '90s nostalgia – or anemoia

Four decades on, and the 1990s – whether you lived through it or not – has begun to look to many, with hindsight, like an ideal age. Certainly, in Western terms, it felt like a less turbulent time – it was long before 9/11, the economic crash of 2008, and today's extreme political division.

On top of that, Love Story has uncovered a lot of nostalgia for love in the '90s, and how romances developed back then: there were no swipes left or right, or anxious WhatsApp messages. "When the show starts," says Bonanne, "we're watching two people connect through real life flirtatious run-ins and we are longing for those experiences in an extremely online world."

More generally, its success proves the allure of a pre-digital age, says journalist and author Glynnis MacNicol. "I think that we're all craving life offline to an extreme degree. We are exhausted by our phones, by social media, by the relentlessness of the news cycle. And this era, and this show, is allowing us to time travel to a moment where phones didn't exist; a time and place where the analogue life was seemingly filled with delight and serendipity and fun and real faces." 

Though, as MacNicol notes, younger viewers won't be feeling a sense of nostalgia, but anemoia – a wistful longing for a time, place, or era that one has never actually experienced or lived through. "We are very much on schedule for the look back at [the '90s]. It seems to happen when people who are old enough to remember are still around – I'm in my 50s and I certainly remember this like it was yesterday – [but when] there's enough young people who have no memory of it and it seems exotic." 

It just so happened that some of the biggest TV shows of the late '90s – Friends, Sex And The City, The Sopranos – were all centred around life in New York; and they helped shape its reputation as one of the coolest cities in the world. 

Love Story cements that idea once again. In early episodes, we see a mid-twenty-something Bessette hop from fancy fashion launch party to restaurant to nightclub, before hauling herself out of bed and heading to Calvin Klein's office, where she worked, picking up a coffee and a copy of Vogue magazine from the ubiquitous newsstands on the way. It's........

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