Love Story: JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is, at its best, a genuinely affecting portrait of a couple the world couldn’t stop watching — and it’s easy to see why we were obsessed. He was a man who had only ever known fame, born into the brightest spotlight in America and taught from childhood to perform under it. She was a woman who never wanted any of it, pulled from a life she’d chosen into one that had been chosen for her. The friction between those two truths is the real love story here, and the series is sharpest when it lets you sit in it.

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As far as Love Story goes, the telling is largely great: restrained where it could have been lurid, empathetic without canonising either of them, and clear-eyed about the way the press, the public and the family machine conspired to turn two people into a brand. You understand the tragedy not as a single moment but as a slow closing of doors.

It does sag in the middle, though — the timeline stretches, the same beats get re-circled, and a few episodes feel like they’re keeping time rather than building. And episode eight was, frankly, a waste of time: a finale-adjacent hour that coasts on sentiment the earlier episodes had already earned more honestly.

Still, when it lands, it lands. A deep, occasionally uneven look at a golden couple whose ending was always going to break the world’s heart.