In these troubled times, who isn’t loving the nostalgia of the Kennedys and Love Story’s 90s New York? | Emma Brockes

In these troubled times, who isn’t loving the nostalgia of the Kennedys and Love Story’s 90s New York? Emma Brockes It’s monstrously presumptuous? Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now I f you are looking for a break in the clouds from this terrible news cycle, can I direct you towards Love Story , the nine-part series executive-produced – but crucially, not written! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You might think this isn’t for you, that it’ll be too tabloidy or that you’re not interested in JFK Jr. But while Love Story, which takes us back to a very particular version of early-1990s New York, might not seem like the show we want right now, it is exactly the show that we need. This probably sounds like a heartless summary of a true story that ends in the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while flying his wife and her sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light aircraft, killing everyone on board). But that tragic end only suffuses the preceding nine hours of storytelling with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just the thing to see off the iron-grey wash of today’s reality. The New York of Love Story isn’t the city’s current iteration, with its impossible rents and charmless finance bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the 1990s New York of, say, Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump strides through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster. Instead, Love Story takes place in the stylised New York of Kate Moss, freshly discovered at Calvin Klein; it’s lunch at the Four Seasons and dinner at Indochine. It’s an excellent Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, standing in the street using one of those half-enclosed pay phones, and Sarah Pidgeon, excellent as Bessette, blowing smoke through the three-inch crack of a window. Before this show, I harboured absolutely no nostalgia for smoking in office...